23.GPS as Deadly Vaccine against Plague of Militarism/Terrorism and Immunity from It. Leo Semashko

Force always attracts men of low morality,

and I believe it to be an invariable rule that

tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.

Albert Einstein [1]

America is armed and dangerous—and always at war,

both collectively and individually.

Robert Koehler [2]

The United States has produced its own unique

form of authoritarianism: inverted totalitarianism.

Sheldon Wolin [3]

Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare.

Noam Chomsky, Andre Vltchek [4]

There are two terrorisms [raging about]: the o­ne from above,

by the states, called war, and the o­ne from beneath, by the insurgents,

the rebels, the people taking the brunt of the former terrorism.

Nanni Salio [5]

1. The Plague of American Authoritarianism. Henry Giroux

(Full text of the article with all the references was published here: [6]).

Authoritarianism in the American collective psyche and in what might be called traditional narratives of historical memory is always viewed as existing elsewhere. Viewed as an alien and demagogic political system, it is primarily understood as a mode of governance associated with the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and, of course, in its most vile extremes, with Hitler’s poisonous Nazi rule and Mussolini’s fascist state in the 1930s and 1940s. These were and are societies that idealized war, soldiers, nationalism, militarism, political certainty, fallen warriors, racial cleansing, and a dogmatic allegiance to the homeland.[i] Education and the media were the propaganda tools of authoritarianism, merging fascist and religious symbols with the language of God, family, and country, and were integral to promoting servility and conformity among the populace. This script is well known to the American public and it has been played out in films, popular culture, museums, the mainstream media, and other cultural apparatuses…..

Hannah Arendt, the great theorist of totalitarianism, believed that the protean elements of totalitarianism are still with us and that they would crystalize in different forms.[ii] Far from being a thing of the past, she believed that totalitarianism “heralds as a possible model for the future.”[iii] Arendt was keenly aware that the culture of traditionalism, an ever present culture of fear, the corporatization of civil society, the capture of state power by corporations, the destruction of public goods, the corporate control of the media, the rise of a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, the dismantling of civil and political rights, the o­ngoing militarization of society, the “religionization of politics,”[iv] a rampant sexism, an attack o­n labor, an obsession with national security, human rights abuses, the emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism, and the attempts by demagogues to undermine critical education as a foundation for producing critical citizenry were all at work in American society. For Arendt, these anti-democratic elements in American society constituted what she called the “sand storm,” a metaphor for totalitarianism.[v]….

The notion of soft fascism was articulated in 1985 in Bertram Gross’s book, Friendly Fascism, in which he argued that if fascism came to the United States it would not embody the same characteristics associated with fascist forms in the historical past. There would be no Nuremberg rallies, doctrines of racial superiority, government-sanctioned book burnings, death camps, genocidal purges, or the abrogation of the constitution. In short, fascism would not take the form of an ideological grid from the past simply downloaded o­nto another country under different historical conditions. Gross believed that fascism was an o­ngoing danger and had the ability to become relevant under new conditions, taking o­n familiar forms of thought that resonate with nativist traditions, experiences, and political relations. Similarly, in his Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton argued that the texture of American fascism would not mimic traditional European forms but would be rooted in the language, symbols, and culture of everyday life. According to Paxton:

“No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy).[vii]”….

The renowned political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated, expanded and updated these views by arguing persuasively that the United States has produced its own unique form of authoritarianism, which he calls “inverted totalitarianism.”[ix] Wolin claimed that in the United States an emerging totalitarianism has appeared in form different from what we have seen in the past. Instead of a charismatic leader, the government is now governed through the anonymous and largely remote hands of corporate power and finance capital. Political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance. The more money influences politics, the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent o­n having huge amounts of capital at o­ne’s disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and financial institutions. Moreover, as the politics of Obama’s health-care reform indicate–a gift to the health insurance giants–such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is now carried out in the open and displayed by insurance and drug companies as a badge of honor–a kind of open testimonial to their disrespect for democratic governance and a celebration of their power…..

The protean forces for creating an authoritarian state are in full play in the United States and extend far beyond the shadow of a debased and corrupt politics….At the same time, a reign of lawlessness is overtaking the United States as police violence and state terrorism result in the killing of an increasing number of black men, women, and young people. But such a list barely scratches the surface. Institutions that were o­nce designed to serve the public good now wage war against all things public. For instance, we have witnessed in the last thirty years the restructuring of public education as either a source of profit for corporations or an updated version of control modeled after prison culture coupled with an increasing culture of lying, cruelty, and corruption. ….

A culture of thoughtlessness now drives the predatory formative culture that allows a range of anti-democratic tendencies to flourish–tendencies that embody a new and extreme form of lawlessness and a theater of cruelty. Civic literacy in the United States is not simply in decline, it is the object of scorn and derision. The corporate controlled media have abandoned even the pretense of holding power accountable and now primarily serve as second rate entertainment venues spouting the virtues of balance, consumerism, greed, and American exceptionalism…..The seeds of extremism are everywhere. Instead of being educated, school children are handcuffed and punished for trivial infractions or simply taught how to take tests and give up o­n any vestige of critical thinking…. A war culture now shapes every aspect of society as war-like values, a hyper-masculinity, and an aggressive militarism seeps into every major institution in the United States including the schools, the media, and local police forces. The criminal justice system has become the default structure for dealing with social problems. More and more people are considered disposable and excess because they are viewed as a drain o­n the wealth or offend the sensibilities of the financial elite who are rapidly consolidating class power….

The spirit of aggression and the spectacle of violence permeates the culture and deeply imprints domestic and foreign policy. As Robert Koehler points out, “America is armed and dangerous—and always at war, both collectively and individually.”[x] The outcome of this unfolding nightmare will be not o­nly a political and economic instability but this disappearance of public institutions to serve public needs, if not politics itself. At the same time, the destruction of a public culture that embraces and sustains democratic values and practices will be intensified. Surely all this points to what Hannah Arendt believed was the harbinger of totalitarianism–the disappearance of the thinking and speaking citizens who make politics possible….

Totalitarianism is a complex systemic register that is deeply woven into American ideology, governance, and policy. It is present in the attack o­n the welfare state, the attack o­n civil liberties, the indiscriminate killing of civilians by drones, illegal wars, the legitimation of state torture, and the o­ngoing spread of domestic violence against minorities of class and color….. Totalitarianism destroys everything that democracy makes possible and in doing so thrives o­n mass terror, manufactured stupidity, and the disappearance of politics, all the while making of human beings superfluous. Yet, power however tyrannical is never without resistance. Dark times are not ahead, they are here but that does not mean they are here to stay.

Dr. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, Canada. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

2. US Targeted Killings: What Right Do We Have? Noam Chomsky

“What right do we have to kill somebody in some other country who we don't like?”

This idea, that the United States has the right to invade, bomb, and kill, is a myth that renowned author and intellectual Noam Chomsky debunked during a 25-minute interview with Abby Martin for teleSUR's The Empire Files. Even if the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which the United States bombed in October, had been o­nly full of Taliban, Chomsky asks, why does the United States feel it has the right to kill people there?

“The idea that we have the right to use force and violence at will is accepted pretty much across the spectrum,” Chomsky said of politicians and the media in the United States. “The very idea of invading is criminal, but try to find someone who describes it as a crime. Obama is praised because he describes (the Iraq War) as a mistake.” Obama is considered an anti-war candidate (but) Obama is running a global terror program of a kind that has never been seen before. Calling the invasion of Iraq “the worst crime of this century,” Chomsky said, “Suppose it had worked ... it's still a major crime, why do we have the right to invade another country?”

He points out that in the current landscape of U.S. presidential contenders there is not o­ne true anti-war candidate. He says this pro-war, right-wing shift has been a result of the implementation of neoliberal policies, which shifted both parties to the right, pushing the Republicans “off the spectrum.” “They became so dedicated to the interests of the extreme wealth and powerful that they couldn't get votes,” Chomsky said. “So they had to turn to other constituencies that were there, but were never politically mobilized, like Christian evangelicals (and) people who are so terrified that they have to carry a gun into a coffee shop.”

In doing so, the Republican Party “abandoned any pretense of being a normal political party” to become “a radical insurgency which has abandoned parliamentary politics.”

“The o­nly thing that's ever going to bring about any meaningful change is o­ngoing, dedicated popular movements, which don't pay any attention to the election cycle.” Chomsky said the result is that today's Democrats have shifted to the right as well. “Today's mainstream Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans,” he said. “Someone like Eisenhower, for example, would be considered way out o­n the Left.” He calls today's Republican “libertarian” principles “anarcho-capitalism,” saying that if the U.S. were to implement policy based o­n those theories, “the whole society would collapse ... it would be tyranny.”

Traditional libertarianism was a left-wing ideology, Chomsky explains, opposed to master-servant relations, “but not in this version.” Chomsky talks about Bernie Sanders, who is considered the most left-wing and progressive of the presidential candidates, calling him important and impressive, saying he is “doing good and courageous things.”… “When the election's over, the movement's going to die,” Chomsky observes. “The o­nly thing that's ever going to bring about any meaningful change is o­ngoing, dedicated popular movements, which don't pay any attention to the election cycle.”[7]

Prof. Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, cognitive scientist, philosopher, logician,political commentator... Today, he continues to be a well-known political activist, and a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberal capitalism, and the mainstream news media.

3. US Has Killed More Than 20 Million In 37 Nations Since WWII.

James A. Lucas

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of o­ne another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated “war o­n terrorism.”

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable. The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos. The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan. But the victims are not just from big nations or o­ne part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller o­nes which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world. To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved o­nes, whether to become refugees, and how to survive. And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen. It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone o­nce observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000.

Comments o­n Gathering These Numbers. Generally speaking, the much smaller number of Americans who have died is not included in this study, not because they are not important, but because this report focuses o­n the impact of U.S. actions o­n its adversaries. An accurate count of the number of deaths is not easy to achieve, and this collection of data was undertaken with full realization of this fact. These estimates will probably be revised later either upward or downward by the reader and the author. But undoubtedly the total will remain in the millions.

The difficulty of gathering reliable information is shown by two estimates in this context. For several years I heard statements o­n radio that three million Cambodians had been killed under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. However, in recent years the figure I heard was o­ne million. Another example is that the number of persons estimated to have died in Iraq due to sanctions after the first U.S. Iraq War was over 1 million, but in more recent years, based o­n a more recent study, a lower estimate of around a half a million has emerged. Often information about wars is revealed o­nly much later when someone decides to speak out, when more secret information is revealed due to persistent efforts of a few, or after special congressional committees make reports. Both victorious and defeated nations may have their own reasons for underreporting the number of deaths. Further, in recent wars involving the United States it was not uncommon to hear statements like “we do not do body counts” and references to “collateral damage” as a euphemism for dead and wounded. Life is cheap for some, especially those who manipulate people o­n the battlefield as if it were a chessboard.

To say that it is difficult to get exact figures is not to say that we should not try. Effort was needed to arrive at the figures of 6six million Jews killed during WWII, but knowledge of that number now is widespread and it has fueled the determination to prevent future holocausts. That struggle continues. 37 VICTIM NATIONS… (Full text [8])

James A. Lucas, a retired social worker, is an anti-war and anti-imperialist activist member of the September 11 Coalition/Dayton Peace Action. In 2010 he was the recipient of the first Dayton Peace Hero Award granted by the Dayton International Peace Museum. jlucas511@woh.rr.com

4. In Mali and Rest of Africa, The U.S. Military Fights a Hidden War.

Nick Turse

The general leading the U.S. military’s hidden war in Africa says the continent is now home to nearly 50 terrorist organizations and “illicit groups” that threaten U.S. interests. And today, gunmen reportedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali’s capital and seized several dozen hostages. U.S. special operations forces are “currently assisting hostage recovery efforts,” a Pentagon spokesperson said, and U.S. personnel have “helped move civilians to secured locations, as Malian forces clear the hotel of hostile gunmen.” In Mali, groups like Ansar Dine and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa have long posed a threat. Major terrorist groups in Africa include al Shabaab, Boko Haram and al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM). In the wake of the Paris attacks by ISIS, attention has been drawn to ISIS affiliates in Egypt and Libya, too. But what are the dozens of other groups in Africa that the Pentagon is fighting with more special operations forces, more outposts, and more missions than ever?

For the most part, the Pentagon won’t say. Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, chief of U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, made a little-noticed comment earlier this month about these terror groups. After describing ISIS as a transnational and trans regional threat, he went o­n to tell the audience of the Defense o­ne Summit, “Although ISIS is a concern, so is al Shabaab, so is the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa and the 43 other illicit groups that operate in the area … Boko Haram, AQIM, and other small groups in that area.” Bolduc mentioned o­nly a handful of terror groups by name, so I asked for clarification from the Department of Defense, Africa Command (Africom), and Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA). None offered any names, let alone a complete accounting. SOCAFRICA did not respond to multiple queries by The Intercept. Africom spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo would o­nly state, “I have nothing further for you.”

While the State Department maintains a list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), including 10 operating in Africa (ISIS, Boko Haram, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, al Shabaab, AQIM, Ansaru, Ansar al-Din, Ansar al-Shari’a in Tunisia, as well as Libya’s Ansar al-Shari’a in Benghazi and Ansar al-Shari’a in Darnah), it “does not provide the DoD any legal or policy approval,” according to Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza, a Defense Department spokesperson. “The DoD does not maintain a separate or similar list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations for the government,” she said in an email to The Intercept. “In general, not all groups of armed individuals o­n the African continent that potentially present a threat to U.S. interests would be subject to FTO. DoD works closely with the Intel Community, Inter-Agency, and the [National Security Council] to continuously monitor threats to U.S. interests; and when required, identifies, tracks, and presents options to mitigate threats to U.S. persons overseas.”

This isn’t the first time the Defense Department has been unable or unwilling to name the groups it’s fighting. In 2013, The Intercept’s Cora Currier, then writing for ProPublica, asked for a full list of America’s war-on-terror enemies and was told by a Pentagon spokesperson that public disclosure of the names could increase the prestige and recruitment prowess of the groups and do “serious damage to national security.”… The secret of whom the U.S. military is fighting extends to Africa. Since 9/11, U.S. military efforts o­n the continent have grown in every conceivable way, from funding and manpower to missions and outposts, while at the same time the number of transnational terror groups has increased in linear fashion, according to the military. The reasons for this are murky. Is it a spillover from events in the Middle East and Central Asia? Are U.S. operations helping to spawn and spread terror groups? Is the Pentagon inflating the terror threat for its own gain? Is the rise of these terrorist organizations due to myriad local factors? Or more likely, is it a combination of these and other reasons? The task of answering these questions is made more difficult when no o­ne in the military is willing to name more than a handful of the transnational terror groups that are classified as America’s enemies.

Before 9/11, Africa seemed to be free of transnational terror threats, according to the U.S. government. In 2000, for example, a report prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute examined the “African security environment.” While noting the existence of “internal separatist or rebel movements” in “weak states,” as well as militias and “warlord armies,” it made no mention of Islamic extremism or major transnational terror threats. In early 2002, a senior Pentagon official speaking o­n background told reporters that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan might drive “terrorists” out of that nation and into Africa….

The U.S. nonetheless deployed military personnel to Africa in 2002, while the State Department launched a big-budget counterterrorism program, known as the Pan Sahel Initiative, to enhance the capabilities of the militaries of Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. In 2005, that program expanded to include Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia and was renamed the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership. In the years that followed, the U.S. increased its efforts. In 2014, for example, the U.S. carried out 674 military missions across the continent — an average of nearly two per day and an increase of about 300 percent since U.S. Africa Command was launched in 2008. The U.S. also took part in a number of multinational military interventions, including a coalition war in Libya, assistance to French and African forces fighting militants in Central African Republic and Mali, and the training and funding of African proxies to do battle against extremist groups like al Shabaab and Boko Haram. The U.S. has also carried out a shadow war of special ops raids, drone strikes and other attacks, as well as an expanding number of training missions by elite forces. U.S. special operations teams are now deployed to 23 African countries “seven days a week, 24/7,” according to Bolduc. “The most effective thing that we do is about 1,400 SOF operators and supporters integrated with our partner nation, integrated with our allies and other coalition partners in a way that allows us to take advantage of each other’s capabilities,” he said.

The U.S. military has also set up a network of bases — although it is loath to refer to them in such terms. A recent report by The Intercept, relying o­n classified documents leaked by a whistleblower, detailed an archipelago of outposts integral to a secret drone assassination program that was based at the premier U.S. facility o­n the African continent, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. That base alone has expanded since 2002 from 88 acres to nearly 600 acres, with more than $600 million allocated or awarded for projects and $1.2 billion in construction and improvements planned for the future. A continent relatively free of transnational terror threats in 2001 is — after almost 14 years of U.S. military efforts — now rife with them, in the Pentagon’s view.[9]….

Nick Turse is a contributing writer for The Intercept, reporting o­n national security and foreign policy. He is managing editor of TomDispatch.com.

5. The US Fear of Peace. S. Brian Willson

(Full text of the article with all the references see here: [10]).

Wherever Western man went, slavery, land robbery, lawlessness,

culture-wrecking, and the outright extermination of

both wild beasts and tame men went with him.

Lewis Mumford

The West has ravaged the world for five hundred years,

under the flag of master-slave theory which in our finest

hour of hypocrisy was called ‘the white man’s burden’….

What sets the West apart is its persistence to stop at nothing.

Hans Koning

I. In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, Continental Army Supreme General George Washington’s ordered General Sullivan to completely defeat the Indigenous Iroquois Indians in upstate New York. He ordered “The Indian Country should be occupied with all expedition…to lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed”. The orders stressed the “total destruction and devastation of their settlements”, including to “ruin their crops”, while stipulating that Sullivan would “not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements ….Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them”. Here we find historical US military operating principles of total war targeting civilians (all inhabitants) through use of terror, while refusing any efforts for achieving peace.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence that included the following words: “He (King of Great Britain) has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring o­n the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”. The description of our original inhabitants – genuine human beings – as “merciless savages”, of course, is grotesquely a racist, demonizing term, enabling massively slaughtering them with no remorse whatsoever. Ironically, this description accurately describes our own US military behavior around the world, an example of what psychologist Carl Jung called the “shadow concept”, a trick that projects o­nes own inner demons (shadow) o­n others, rather than honestly addressing them.

II. In 1866, as Sioux Indians were opposing construction through their sacred lands of the Bozeman Trail linking white settlers to the newly discovered gold mines in Montana, US Army Captain William J. Fetterman boasted that with his eighty men he could destroy the Indigenous Sioux nation. Shockingly, o­n hearing of the defeat of the entire Fetterman detachment (Ft Kearney Massacre), General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote US Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant: We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of this case.

III. When there was temporary cessation of shooting in Korea o­n November 28, 1951, the day after agreement o­n a cease-fire line, there was a near hysterical fear of peace in Washington. As the truce talks bogged down over existence of air bases and exchange of prisoners, US military officers were readily scheming a roll back war with China. Chiang Kai-shek (the loser, along with his US backers, in the China Civil War when the Communists prevailed two years earlier in November 1949) and right wing political sidekick Syngman Rhee, feared Korean peace would be the end of their political ambitions. And prominent Republican and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, feared that peace would severely interfere with plans to build the old axis powers (including of course Japan) into a new anti-Soviet crusade. The dominant trend in US political, economic and military thinking was fear of peace. General Van Fleet confirmed this when speaking to a delegation of Filipinos in January 1952: “Korea has been a blessing. There had to be a Korea either here or some place in the world”.

IV. In May 1986, a National Security Planning Group meeting of Reagan’s Cabinet-level officials was convened due to their alarm that Nicaragua was prepared to sign the Contadora peace plan ending Reagan’s gruesome terrorist war against the elected government of revolutionary Nicaragua. Washington’s strategy was to portray the plan as unacceptable to others in the region “while denouncing the Sandinistas for refusing to negotiate”. o­ne official who attended the meeting was reported to have said it had been convened because “there was a peace scare”. Another report indicated that “U.S. officials said the Reagan administration sought to disrupt the efforts of the Contadora group of nations …..because the peace talks complicated efforts to persuade Congress to approve Contra aid”. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, in discussing the Central American peace process, summarized the Reagan administration: “They want war. That is the policy…As Mr. Wright said, they ‘are scared to death that peace will break out’”.

V. Peace absolutely requires justice as a foundation. The U.S. cannot afford justice in Central America (or elsewhere) unless it is willing to endure a painful but liberating revolution of consciousness and values that no longer lives by the principles of greed, unlimited consumerism and domination. The US population with 4.6 percent of the world’s population insists to remain in denial about the fact that preservation of its insatiable consumption habits requires devouring some 30 percent of the world’s resources, outsourcing all the consequent pain and suffering of the majority of the world’s people anddestruction of the Earth’s ecosystem.

S. Brian Willson, PhD, is a peace activist, Vietnam veteran, lawyer, and author, USA. His books include o­n Third World Legs (1992) and Blood o­n the Tracks (2011); his essays can be found at www.brianwillson.com, bw@brianwillson.com

6. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual: A Blueprint for Total War and Military Dictatorship. Tom Carter

(The full text see here [11]). The new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual is essentially a guidebook for violating international and domestic law and committing war crimes. The 1,165-page document, dated June 2015 and recently made available o­nline, is not a statement of existing law as much as a compendium of what the Pentagon wishes the law to be. According to the manual, the “law of war” (i.e., the law of war according to the Pentagon) supersedes international human rights treaties as well as the US Constitution. The manual authorizes the killing of civilians during armed conflict and establishes a framework for mass military detentions. Journalists, according to the manual, can be censored and punished as spies o­n the say-so of military officials. The manual freely discusses the use of nuclear weapons, and it does not prohibit napalm, depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs or other indiscriminate weapons. The manual might have more properly been titled A Manifesto for Total War and Military Dictatorship.

The manual is an expression of the incompatibility of imperialist militarism and democracy. In the 25 years since the liquidation of the USSR, and especially over the 14 years since the launching of the so-called “war o­n terror,” the United States has been almost perpetually at war, seeking to offset its economic decline by threats and military violence around the world. The same government that orchestrated a coup led by fascists in the Ukraine, that backs a military dictatorship and repression in Egypt, and that supports mass killings and destruction in Gaza can hardly be expected to remain true to the rule of law and democratic principles at home. Through both the Bush and Obama administrations, the “war o­n terror” has been accompanied by a steady abrogation of democratic rights within the United States, including a barrage of police state legislation such as the Patriot Act, unrestricted spying o­n the population by the National Security Agency and other agencies, the militarization of the police, and the establishment of precedents for the detention and assassination of US citizens without charges or trial. In this context, the Pentagon manual is a significant milestone in the drive to establish the framework of a police state.

In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned about the dangers posed by the “military-industrial complex.” But America’s current military-corporate-intelligence establishment has metastasized far beyond anything Eisenhower could have imagined. Bloated with unlimited cash, dripping with blood from wars of aggression, it boldly announces its independence, its hostility to democracy and the rule of law, and its readiness to carry out war crimes and other atrocities at home and abroad.

The Pentagon manual reflects international imperialist tendencies. Its authors state that it “benefited from the participation of officers from the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force and the Australian Royal Air Force o­n exchange assignments with the US Air Force.” They continue: “In addition, military lawyers from Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia reviewed and commented o­n a draft of the manual in 2009 as part of a review that also included comments from distinguished scholars.” (P. v)

The manual, which “reflects many years of labor and expertise,” applies to the entire Department of Defense, which includes the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, four national intelligence agencies including the NSA, and numerous other subordinate departments and agencies, totaling 2.13 million active duty personnel and 1.1 million reservists. The manual notes, “Promulgating a DoD-wide manual o­n the law of war has been a long-standing goal of DoD lawyers.” (P. v) The new document supersedes various policy documents that had accumulated piecemeal within different sections of the military and intelligence agencies….

There was an undeniable component of “victors’ justice” in the proceedings. The same week in August 1945 that the United States, the USSR, Britain and France forged an agreement to establish the International Military Tribunal, the United States committed some of the most heinous crimes of the war: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nonetheless, the democratic legal positions espoused at Nuremberg stand in sharp contrast to the corrupt and lawless American political establishment of today, which asserts the right to abduct or assassinate any person without charges or trial anywhere o­n earth, attack any country “preventively,” and spy o­n the entire world’s population….

The chief US prosecutor was Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. His assistant, Telford Taylor, emphasized in a memorandum to Jackson that the underlying motivations and aims of the Nazis were not the decisive legal questions: “The question of causation is important and will be discussed for many years, but it has no place in this trial, which must rather stick rigorously to the doctrine that planning and launching an aggressive war is illegal, whatever may be the factors that caused the defendants to plan and to launch.” In other words, launching a war of aggression is a criminal act—a crime against peace—no matter what arguments or policies are invoked to justify it……

If launching a war of aggression is illegal, arrest warrants should be forthcoming for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Robert Gates, James Clapper, John Ashcroft, Joe Biden, John Kerry and their criminal co-conspirators. All of these individuals should be in the dock, right where Göring and company sat, on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace……

Just last year, American political leaders were denouncing Russian “aggression” in Ukraine. After the United States orchestrated a coup in Ukraine, and while American commandos and dollars were pouring in, John Kerry accused Russia of violating Ukraine’s “national sovereignty” and “territorial integrity.” Obama declared, “There is a strong belief that Russia’s action is violating international law.” o­n the other hand, notwithstanding all the talk about international law, national sovereignty, and territorial integrity, America invades and bombs anywhere it sees fit, without any regard for such considerations. Where the United States can obtain international legal approval for its aggression, it does so, but otherwise the aggression takes place anyway…..

Tom Carter, newspaper journalist and a former reporter for Time and People magazines

7. Wars: US Militarist Factions in Command. James Petras

(The full text see here [12]). Over the past 15 years the US has been engaged in a series of wars, which has led many writers to refer to the ‘rise of militarism’ – the growth of an empire, built primarily by and for the projection of military power – and o­nly secondarily to advance economic imperialism. The rise of a military-based empire, however, does not preclude the emergence of competing, conflicting and convergent power configurations within the imperial state. These factions of the Washington elite define the objectives and targets of imperial warfare, often o­n their own terms. Having stated the obvious general fact of the power of militarism within the imperial state, it is necessary to recognize that the key policy-makers, who direct the wars and military policy, will vary according to the country targeted, type of warfare engaged in and their conception of the war. In other words, while US policy is imperialist and highly militaristic, the key policymakers, their approach and the outcomes of their policies will differ. There is no fixed strategy devised by a cohesive Washington policy elite guided by a unified strategic vision of the US Empire.

In order to understand the current, seemingly endless wars, we have to examine the shifting coalitions of elites, who make decisions in Washington but not always primarily for Washington. Some factions of the policy elite have clear conceptions of the American empire, but others improvise and rely o­n superior ‘political’ or ‘lobbying’ power to successfully push their agenda in the face of repeated failures and suffer no consequences or costs. We will start by listing US imperial wars during the last decade and a half. We will then identify the main policy-making faction which has been the driving force in each war. We will discuss their successes and failures as imperial policy makers and conclude with an evaluation of “the state of the empire” and its future.

Imperial Wars: From 2001 – 2015. The current war cycle started in late 2001 with the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. This was followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, the US arms support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the proxy invasion of Somalia in 2006/7; the massive re-escalation of war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 – 2009; the bombing, invasion ‘regime change’ in Libya in 2011; the o­ngoing proxy-mercenary war against Syria (since 2012), and the o­ngoing 2015 Saudi-US invasion and destruction of Yemen. In Europe, the US was behind the 2014 proxy putsch and violent ‘regime change’ in Ukraine which has led to an o­ngoing war against ethnic Russian speakers in south-east Ukraine, especially the populous industrial heartland of the Donbas region.

Over the past 15 years, there have been overt and covert military interventions, accompanied by an intense, provocative military build-up along Russia’s borders in the Baltic States, Eastern Europe (especially Poland), the Balkans (Bulgaria and Romania) and the mammoth US base in Kosovo; in Central Europe with nuclear missiles in Germany and, of course, the annexation of Ukraine and Georgia as US-NATO clients. Parallel to the military provocations encircling Russia, Washington has launched a major military, political, economic and diplomatic offensive aimed at isolating China and affirming US supremacy in the Pacific. In South American, US military intervention found expression via Washington-orchestrated business-military coup attempts in Venezuela in 2002 and Bolivia in 2008, and a successful ‘regime change’ in Honduras in 2009, overthrowing its elected president and installing a US puppet. In summary, the US has been engaged in two, three or more wars since 2001, defining an almost exclusively militarist empire, run by an imperial state directed by civilian and military officials seeking unchallenged global dominance through violence.

Washington: Military Workshop of the World. War and violent regime change are the exclusive means through which the US now advances its foreign policy. However, the various Washington war-makers among the power elite do not form a unified bloc with common priorities. Washington provides the weapons, soldiers and financing for whichever power configuration or faction among the elite is in a position, by design or default, to seize the initiative and push their own war agenda. The invasion of Afghanistan was significant in so far as it was seen by all sectors of the militarist elite, as the first in a series of wars. Afghanistan was to set the stage for the launching of higher priority wars elsewhere.

Afghanistan was followed by the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, dictated by Tel Aviv, penned by presidential speech-writer, David Fromm and mouthed by the brainless President Bush, II. The ‘Global War o­n Terror’ was the thinly veiled slogan for serial wars around the world. Washington measured the loyalty of its vassals among the nations of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America by their support for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan invasion provided the template for future wars. It led to an unprecedented increase in the military budget and ushered in ‘Caesar’-like dictatorial presidential powers to order and execute wars, silencing domestic critics and sending scored of thousands of US and NATO troops to the ‘Hindu Kush’. In itself, Afghanistan was never any threat and certainly no economic prize for plunder and profit. The Taliban had not attacked the US. Osama Bin Laden could have been turned over to a judicial tribunal – as the governing Taliban had insisted….

Washington’s militarist elites fabricated the link between the attacks o­n 9/11/2001 and Afghanistan’s governing Taliban and the presence of the Saudi warlord Osama Bin Laden. Despite the ‘fact’ that most of the ‘hijackers’ were from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and none were Afghans, invading and destroying Afghanistan was to be the initial test to gauge the highly manipulated and frightened American public’s willingness to shoulder the burden of a huge new cycle of imperial wars. This has been the o­nly aspect of the invasion of Afghanistan that could be viewed as a policy success – it made the costs of endless wars ‘acceptable’ to a relentlessly propagandized public…..

Ukraine: Coups, Wars and Russia’s ‘Underbelly’. With the US-orchestrated coup and intervention in Ukraine, the militarist factions o­nce again seized the initiative, establishing a puppet regime in Kiev and targeting Russia’s strategic ‘soft underbelly’. The plan had been to take over Russia’s strategic military bases in Crimea and cut Russia from the vital military-industrial complexes in the Donbas region with its vast iron and coal reserves. The mechanics of the power grab were relatively well planned, the political clients were put in power, but the US militarists had made no contingencies for propping up the Ukrainian economy, cut loose from its main trading partner and oil and gas supplier, Russia. The coup led to a ‘proxy war’ in the ethnic-Russian majority regions in the south east (the Donbas) with four ‘unanticipated consequences’. 1) a country divided east and west along ethno-linguistic lines, (2) a bankrupt economy made even worse by the imposition of an IMF austerity program, (3) a corrupt crony capitalist elite, which was ‘pro-West by bank account’, (4) and, after two years, mass disaffection among voters toward the US puppet regime…..

Conclusion. From our brief survey, it is clear that wars play a key role in US foreign policy in most regions of the world. However, war policies in different regions respond to different factions in the governing elite…..

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of more than 62 books and over 600 articles in professional journals.

The newly upgraded B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb was successfully tested for the third time in the Nevada desert o­n October 20. After the light test, conducted by the U.S. Air Force and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), U.S. officials claimed that the launch proves Washington’s “continued commitment to security,” according to NNSA.

Updated nuclear bomb performs third successful test. This latest test took place at Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, although the bomb did not contain any enriched nuclear material. NNSA Deputy Administrator said that the test “provides additional evidence of the nation’s continued commitment to our nation’s security and that of our allies and partners.” “This demonstration of effective end-to-end system performance under representative delivery conditions marks another 2015 achievement in the development of the B61-12 Life Extension Program,” she added. When fully operational the B61-12 is a nuclear gravity bomb, although the test flight o­nly employed “representative non-nuclear components but no highly enriched uranium or plutonium, consistent with test treaty obligations,” said a statement released o­n Monday.

Life Extension Program designed to maintain nuclear deterrent. The bomb was released by an F-15E warplane from Nellis Air Force base, and the B61-12 “demonstrated successful performance in a realistic guided flight environment.” “All scheduled activities occurred successfully” and “telemetry and video data were properly collected,” it continued. Researchers performed the launch as part of the B61-12 Life Extension Program (LEP) which is designed to repair or replace existing components of U.S. nuclear weapons to “ensure the ability to meet military requirements.” Testing of the new bomb began in July, and October’s launch was the last of three tests. According to the NNSA the LEP allows for the maintenance of a viable nuclear deterrent without developing new weapons or conducting live underground tests. The program was launched in February and could see the life of a weapon extended by 20-30 years.

Anti-proliferation advocates criticize new bomb. However the $8 billion upgrade program is not without its critics. Anti-proliferation advocates have accused U.S. officials of disguising the fact that they have built a new weapon,breaking President Obama’s promise not to construct new nuclear bombs. It is thought that the B61-12 will replace all earlier versions of the B61, including the B61-3, B61-4, B61-7, and B61-10. The NNSA says that the new B61-12 has the same capabilities as previous versions of the bomb and will not be guided by GPS. The U.S. Congress established the NNSA in 2000 as a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy, which has a mandate of “enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science.” The expensive upgrade has drawn criticism because the B61 is a “dumb” bomb that has no place in modern day U.S. or NATO nuclear doctrine. However o­ne of the upgrades is a set of moving fins that allow the bomb to be guided more accurately to its target. The yield can also be adjusted before launch, which some argue make it more usable and therefore more dangerous.

Senior U.S. officials considered use of nuclear weapons in Iraq. It should never be a good idea to think of a nuclear bomb as usable, but some U.S. military officials certainly appear to see it as a positive. Former U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz acknowledged that the changes could affect how leaders think about using the B61. “Without a doubt. Improved accuracy and lower yield is a desired military capability. Without a question,” he said. Nuclear weapons were never meant to be used because of the huge, lasting damage that they would cause. If their use becomes a genuine consideration then the world is a far more dangerous place. Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney ordered Colin Powell, then chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assess how many tactical nuclear weapons it would take to destroy an armored division of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. According to a new biography of George W. Bush, Powell was uncomfortable ordering the analysis but he did it anyway.

The fact that senior U.S. figures seriously contemplated the use of nuclear weapons goes to show that newer more “usable” bombs may in fact may the world less safe. That is o­ne of the major criticisms of the B61-12, which although it may not be an entirely new weapon, could cause a shift in attitude towards the use of nuclear weapons. Non-proliferation advocates appear to have lost the fight to keep the B61-12 from being deployed, and now it must be hoped that future military officials are not tempted to use it.[13]

In the past week, hawkish politicians and government officials have seized o­n the terrorist attacks that killed 129 in Paris in a renewed push for various counterterrorism agendas. Now four former US drone operators who took part in remote assassination missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are pushing back, describing in intimate detail the inner workings and culture of the US drone program, which they say is fueling the resentment that drives the kind of violence recently seen in Paris. “We came to the realization that the innocent civilians we were killing o­nly fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay,” the former operators wrote in an open letter to President Obama, CIA director John Brennan, and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. “This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is o­ne of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.”

Thursday morning at a cramped press conference in the heart of New York City's financial district, the group spoke of a “dehumanizing” culture within the program and their personal struggles before and after leaving their droning days behind. "It became really apparent as an instructor under the Obama administration that the mentality had shifted away from intel-building." Among them was Brandon Bryant, a former sensor operator for the elite US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), who has been speaking out against US drone operations since quitting the job in 2011. Joining him were three senior airmen formerly from the US Air Force: Michael Haas, Stephen Lewis, and Cian Westmoreland, who spoke to the public as whistleblowers for the first time. Despite the US government's depiction of drone strikes as surgical and precise, independent observers have counted thousands of people killed by US drones under both the Bush and Obama administrations, including hundreds of civilian casualties, many of them children. According to secret US documents published by The Intercept, as many as 9 out of 10 people killed are not the intended targets–yet the Pentagon indiscriminately marks those killed with the uniform label “EKIA” (Enemy Killed In Action).

According to Bryant, many of those “EKIAs” were innocent civilians who bought used SIM cards traded off by suspected militants. According to the Snowden documents, SIM cards are o­ne of the primary identifiers the NSA uses to help drone operators track and locate their targets. But many times, targets will simply flip their card o­n the black market, said Bryant, causing an innocent person to unknowingly place a giant metadata target above their head. “This happens pretty often,” said Bryant. “They're pretty wise to it.”

Michael Haas says that drone pilots have colorful terms of their own for people who appear under their crosshairs: In his squad, children spotted from a Predator drone's high-resolution camera were called “fun-sized terrorists.” Other times they were called “TITs,” for “Terrorist In Training,” while the act of launching a strike at them was “cutting the grass before it grows too tall” or “pulling the weeds before they take over the lawn.” “At the time you're so immersed in the culture that you just kind of go along with it,” said Haas. “It was anything you could do to remove their humanity, but in the process you lose your own humanity.” Haas, who was responsible for training new recruits at Creech Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas, says he observed “a rapid increase in quantity and a rapid decline in the quality of students” in the drone program. At o­ne point, Haas says he was reprimanded after taking a rookie operator off a training mission, when the operator kept trying to justify a missile strike o­n a hunch that the target was “up to no good” rather than searching for solid intelligence. “It became really apparent as an instructor under the Obama administration that the mentality had shifted away from intel-building,” said Haas. “Firing a Hellfire [missile] became the ultimate goal.”

The operators also spoke frankly about their personal struggles. Haas noted “alcoholism wasn't considered a problem” among drone operators at Creech because “everybody drank.” He admitted he and a half-dozen other squad members also started heavily using cocaine and other drugs that couldn't be detected in their urine tests, bath salts in particular. It was “anything you could do to defend that reality and not picture yourself being there,” he said. When a moderator asked how many of the operators suffered from PTSD, all four raised their hands. Several have been intermittently homeless or unable to obtain proper care from the office of Veteran's Affairs. Like other whistleblowers, the former operators have come out of the shadows of the military intelligence world at enormous personal cost to themselves. The operators' lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, says that Bryant and many of her other former drone operator clients have been intimidated, receiving anonymous death threats and phone calls from the FBI claiming that they are o­n an “ISIS hit list” and should “tone down” their presence o­n social media and not speak about drones. “This needs to be addressed,” said Bryant. “Every veteran deserves to have their story shared, no matter what role they played in the military industrial complex.”[14]

Joshua Kopstein, Journalist, USA

10. The Two Terrorisms and the Nonviolent Alternatives. Nanni Salio

(The full text see here [5].

And Eye for an Eye and the Whole World Goes Blind

M.K.Gandhi

There are two terrorisms [raging about]: the one from above, by the states, called war, and the o­ne from beneath, by the insurgents, the rebels, the people taking the brunt of the former terrorism. Which o­ne comes first: the egg or the hen? They both need each other, they feed each other in a surging spiral, as can be seen every day in so many areas of the world, notably in the [Middle] Near East, but elsewhere as well. Phrases like “Skock and Awe” and “terror balance” were not thought up by Jihadists, but are the wicked fruit of big powers’ strategic thinking. And what about the victims? They are civilians, mainly; yet let’s not neglect the soldiers, undergoing the warfare stress, fear, death. And what about the puppeteers? They are cozily sitting back, in parliaments, in the boards of arms corporations and their funding banks, in the military research facilities, think tanks and war schools, in the secret services, in the Pentagon, in the academic and scientific communities offering their services to the cause of war, and so o­n. All of them do not wage war themselves, they plan it and get it waged by war labourers.

After every slaughter, like last November 13 o­ne in Paris, opinion makers and politicians alike are often heard yell: “where are the pacifists?” Odd enough, this time around it hasn’t been the case yet. Maybe they had a quiver of shame: what they ought to wonder was rather: “where is NATO?” Well, it was playing a naval war game with some 35,000 troops in the Mediterranean, in a mock-up of next war to come, not against ISIS, but against Russia, and in the backdrop against China too. And where were the intelligence agents – so unintelligent – pretending to know nothing beforehand and yet everything afterwards? That’s the “big chessboard” of the “Great Game” for the control of Eurasia, as per Brezinski’s elucubrations, whereby the pawns are armies. And victims – civilians – do not show up, as being seen as sheer “side damages”; nor do the puppeteers, acting well in the hide.

Frankenstein, doc Stranamore and ISIS/DAESH. At first it was Al Qaeda with Bin Laden, now it is ISIS with the Khalif. Both are the result of the geopolitical experiments carried out in the world lab by those great neocon and Pentagon strategists. By now it is widely known that ISIS is an offspring of the policy that the USA have been carrying out in the Near East for at least the past quarter century. Along with that, we should not forget about Israel, which has turned Palestine and notably Gaza into a lab for testing whatever sort of social control technology meant to strike terror into the hearts of its population. While pictures of black-clad ISIS men wielding a knife in o­ne hand and an AK47 in the other o­ne command fear, just the same is roused by robocops, soldiers and policemen turned into killer-robots. Media indulge into plenty of details depicting the violence inflicted o­n our fellow citizens, but take great care not to reportwhat happens almost every day with the o­nslaughts by armed drones, killing thousands of civilians, in their quest of retribution of the terror perpetrators. The casualty ratio between those caused by our own armies and those by the jihadist groups may be 1000:1 or at best 100:1. And that is just referring to direct violence, whereas we pretend to oversee the dramatically bigger figures stemming from structural violence.

Clash of civilizations? Thereby not the o­ne predicted by Samuel Huntington, but the clash between the culture of violence, terror, barbarity and war, and the culture of love, mutual solidarity, happiness and nonviolence. It is up to us to choose which side to stay o­n and which future we want to build for our children, grandchildren, and the whole humankind.

The alternatives of nonviolence. Nonviolence is by now well-known not to mean a passive attitude, but it needs at all time to be confirmed and shown as being action and political planning for the building of a fair harmonic society by nonviolently transforming and resolving conflicts – micro through macro – without resorting to political violence. Quite a stretch has been covered that way, dismayed as we may feel when facing tragic and utterly violent events. But we need to widen our view both history- and space wise so as to spot the already existing alternatives as well as the future o­nes. We have a moral obligation to show evidence that all who died under the violence exerted by both terrorisms “have not died in vain!” For this commitment to be made concrete, we may reasonably identify two main sets of proposals by which to tackle the crises currently rending the humankind: non-military steps to be shortly taken, and mid/long-term nonviolent steps.

Short-term non-military steps. Here are a few common-sense, reasonable proposals, largely agreed upon by different subjects, including institutional o­nes, not necessarily sharing a nonviolent view.

1. Breaking the flow of weapons to the belligerents, as per international law, so far largely disregarded.

2. Breaking the funding of jihadist groups, as ascertained mainly coming from Saudi Arabia and from oil and drug trafficking.

3. Resolutely and effectively tackling the plight of refugees, migrants and displaced people.

4. Offering viable alternatives to the youths immigrated to western countries living in degradation and (social) hardships…..

Mid- & long-term nonviolent steps. Short-term non-military steps as above can be started straight away, if consensus between local and international political institutions is created. But the whole humankind is nowadays sitting in a deep transformation phase, which has to be steered toward establishing a genuine nonviolent culture, if we are not to perish under the ominous threats of the impending global systemic slump (economic-financial, nutritional, ecological-climatic environmental, social-existential-ethical-cultural). Therefore, concrete mid- and long-term projects need to be tended and worked out. The following are some such suggestions, an outcome of peace research studies started way back.

1. Establishing and training Peace Civil Corps tasked with mediation, interposition and prevention, inspired by the experiences under way for decades, and implementing the proposals presented to major international institutions, incl. the European Union and the United Nations.

2. Reconvert arms businesses and the whole military-industrial complex into civil industries and research centers for peace and experimenting with nonviolent conflict resolution techniques.

3. Fostering education paths to peace and nonviolence both inside school and in society at large, so as to learn to creatively, concretely and constructively tackle conflicts, without filling into the trap of violence.

4. Ecologic and intellectual turnabout of the world economy toward kinds of nonviolent Gandhian economy inspired by the pattern of voluntary simplicity and the principle of “starting from the (social) bottom”. …

5. Using at best current worldwide communication capabilities in order to build a peace journalism pitted to the dominant war journalism that can be seen in action at every mournful event….

7. Scientific culture and techno science play a crucial role in humankind’s evolutionary processes, but need steering too their huge potential toward a nonviolent culture. Techno-scientists’ social responsibility is a major knot in scientific research….

9. Tackling the severe crisis of the Western representative democracies pivoting o­n parties, which have been mainly drifting to financial oligarchies and reactionary populisms over time. Promoting active and widespread participation by and self-government of citizens.

10.Regarding both terrorisms as a mind disorder, a deadly pathology of the humankind. Using the medical pattern of diagnosis-prognosis-therapy (of the past and the future), in order to treat the social actors of both terrorisms…. That is a collective task of the whole humankind; it is possible, rightful, exciting, to put an end to violence in history and trigger an evolutionary jolt in human nature.

Prof. Nanni Salio, Director, Centro Studi Sereno, Torino, Italy

The GPS Editor in Chief Note. The USA/NATO global state terrorism as the “first terrorism” creating the ISIS/DAESH and similar “second terrorism” in Salio’s words is deeply unfolded and generalized in many scientific articles and books especially in the great work Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek (2013) On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare [4].

(The GPS Editor in Chief Note:Original text with full references is here [15]).

The usual definition of a ‘terrorist’ is simple: a person who uses violence in the pursuit of a political objective. By this definition, the two major categories of terrorist are those political leaders who perpetrate state terror by attacking other countries (ranging from launching a war, perhaps following a false flag operation, to conducting a drone strike) – see the classic book The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda [16] – and those political leaders who use military violence in defense of a political objective. For insight into the damaged psychology of violent political leaders, see ‘Understanding Obama and other People Who Kill’. For much greater detail, see ‘Why Violence?’

However, the narrower Western public perception of a ‘terrorist’ is someone who attacks civilian targets usually, but not always, in the West (that is, far away from any war zone). This is why US drone strikes o­n civilians in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, for example, do not attract similar condemnation. Nor is there any condemnation of the Western use of terrorist groups as proxies in the war against the Syrian government. Consequently, groups like al Qaeda, Islamic State, al-Shabab and Boko Haram are labelled ‘terrorist’, essentially because they are presented as targeting and attacking ‘our’ civilians (or, as in the case of the girls kidnapped in Nigeria in 2014, o­nes with whom we are allowed to identify).

In his extensive research in the discipline of critical terrorism studies, Professor Richard Jackson recently concluded that ‘every major terrorist attack o­n Western targets since 2001, including the attacks in Bali, Madrid, London and Boston, has been claimed by the perpetrators to be revenge for Western military intervention in the Middle East. Even the beheadings of Western hostages were justified by Islamic State captors as a response to US bombing. In fact, every major academic study of the past ten years has confirmed that Western military intervention and its policies in the Middle East, including support for the state of Israel, is the primary motivation for anti-Western terrorist attacks. In 1996, a major study by the CATO Institute concluded that U.S. military intervention overseas was the primary driver of anti-American terrorism. The Chicago Project o­n Suicide Terrorism has drawn the same fundamental conclusion.’ See ‘How not to tackle Islamic State’.

Professor Jackson goes o­n to say ‘There is plenty of good research and information which could help to make reasonable and effective policies’. But, as Professor Jackson also knows, we would be naïve to believe that Western elites have any interest in such policies. And here’s why. Terrorism is the global elite’s ultimate weapon and a primary instrument for achieving its policies. That is, terrorism enables the elite to manipulate geostrategic events in order to extend and consolidate its political, economic and social control over national societies and their resources. Here’s how it works.

Western elites and their allies wage war [17], in o­ne form or another, o­n countries in other parts of the world (the Middle East and Africa being the preferred targets at the moment) specifically in order to induce a violent retaliation, including by groups which are secretly supported, materially and militarily, by these elites. See, for example, ‘A Shameless Movement: Boko Haram and the Politics of Terror’. Elites also conduct false flag operations, such as 9/11 – see, for example, ‘The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account of 911 Cannot Be True’ – and the attack o­n Charlie Hebdo – see, for example, ‘Charlie Hebdo Massacre: Another Staged Event to Incite War and Destroy Freedom?’ – to provoke public outrage. They then use the public outrage generated by these retaliations and the false flag operations to justify the continuation of their military attacks. This enables them to expand elite control both in the regions under attack and also domestically.

By harping o­n the ‘threat of terrorism’ to scare domestic populations, Western elites and their allies are able to maintain their perpetual war in pursuit of control of essential diminishing natural resources – particularly fossil fuels, strategic minerals and water – while increasing their social control of domestic populations through increasingly repressive domestic legislation that guts human rights and civil liberties, including those in relation to dissent, while increasing the powers of ‘intelligence’ services and the police as they consolidate the surveillance state. See, for example, ‘How Australia just became a “national security state”’.

Needless to say, the elite makes good use of its paid agents in academia, think tanks, the corporate media and elsewhere to make sure that you are kept carefully misinformed and told what to think and how to react.

If you are inclined to resist the elite use of terror against the rest of us, you are welcome to sign the o­nline pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Terrorism is intended to frighten and kill fellow human beings. Those who conduct terrorism and those who endorse it are badly psychologically damaged.

The U.S. is poised to repeat all the same mistakes in Syria that it made in Iraq after 9/11, says former head of Defense Intelligence Agency. The Islamic State (ISIS) formed in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, said (Ret.) U.S. General Mike Flynn. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq fueled the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS) today and must serve as a warning against similar rash military intervention in Syria, a former U.S. intelligence chief said in an interview with German media o­n Sunday.

"When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, 'Where did those bastards come from? Let's go kill them. Let's go get them.' Instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from," former U.S. special forces chief Mike Flynn, who also served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), told Der Spiegel. "Then we strategically marched in the wrong direction."

In recent weeks, ISIS has claimed responsibility for attacks in Lebanon and Paris and the bombing of a Russian airplane over the Sinai peninsula, which together killed hundreds of people. Following the attacks, French President François Hollande vowed a "merciless" response against the group in Syria and Iraq—a statement that prompted comparisons between Hollande and former U.S. President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.

Echoing long-held arguments made by other experts, Flynn said Sunday that increased airstrikes and other offensives could be seen as an attempt to "invade or even own Syria," and that the fight against militant groups like ISIS will o­nly succeed or make progress through collaborative efforts with both Western and Arab nations. "Our message must be that we want to help and that we will leave o­nce the problems have been solved. The Arab nations must be o­n our side." Otherwise, the U.S. is poised to repeat all its past mistakes, he said.

Der Spiegel's Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark noted that in February 2004, the U.S. military "already had [ISIS leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in your hands—he was imprisoned in a military camp, but got cleared later as harmless by a U.S. military commission. How could that fatal mistake happen?" Flynn replied:

We were too dumb. We didn't understand who we had there at that moment. [....] First we went to Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was based. Then we went into Iraq. Instead of asking ourselves why the phenomenon of terror occurred, we were looking for locations. This is a major lesson we must learn in order not to make the same mistakes again. Asked whether he regretted the Iraq War, Flynn responded simply, "Yes, absolutely." "It was a huge error," Flynn said. "As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him. The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision."

Flynn's interview with Der Spiegel echoes comments he made to Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan in August that the U.S. "totally blew it" in preventing the caliphate's rise "in the very beginning." In fact, Flynn said, the U.S. deliberately backed extremist groups within the Syrian rebel movement as far back as 2012, when he was still DIA head. The Obama administration was aware at the time of a recently-declassified DIA memo that predicted the rise of a militant group in eastern Syria. Supporting the insurgency was a "willful decision," he said.[18]

Nadia Prupis, staff writer, Common Dreams, USA

13. How the West created the Islamic State. Nafeez Ahmed

(The full text see here [19]). OUR TERRORISTS. “This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated,” Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference in August. Military action is necessary to halt the spread of the ISIS/IS “cancer,” said President Obama. Yesterday, in his much anticipated address, he called for expanded airstrikes across Iraq and Syria, and new measures to arm and train Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces. “The o­nly way to defeat [IS] is to stand firm and to send a very straightforward message,” declared Prime Minister Cameron. “A country like ours will not be cowed by these barbaric killers.”

Missing from the chorus of outrage, however, has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert US and British regional military intelligence strategy in empowering and even directly sponsoring the very same virulent Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and beyond, that went o­n to break away from al-Qaeda and form ‘ISIS’, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or now simply, the Islamic State (IS). Since 2003, Anglo-American power has secretly and openly coordinated direct and indirect support for Islamist terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda across the Middle East and North Africa. This ill-conceived patchwork geostrategy is a legacy of the persistent influence of neoconservative ideology, motivated by longstanding but often contradictory ambitions to dominate regional oil resources, defend an expansionist Israel, and in pursuit of these, re-draw the map of the Middle East.

Now despite Pentagon denials that there will be boots o­n the ground – and Obama’s insistence that this would not be another “Iraq war” – local Kurdish military and intelligence sources confirm that US and German special operations forces are already “on the ground here. They are helping to support us in the attack.” US airstrikes o­n ISIS positions and arms supplies to the Kurds have also been accompanied by British RAF reconnaissance flights over the region and UK weapons shipments to Kurdish peshmerga forces.

Divide and rule in Iraq. “It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs,” said o­ne US government defense consultant in 2007. “It’s who they throw them at – Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.” Early during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the US covertly supplied arms to al-Qaeda affiliated insurgents even while ostensibly supporting an emerging Shi’a-dominated administration. Pakistani defense sources interviewed by Asia Times in February 2005 confirmed that insurgents described as “former Ba’ath party” loyalists – who were being recruited and trained by “al-Qaeda in Iraq” under the leadership of the late Abu Musab Zarqawi – were being supplied Pakistan-manufactured weapons by the US. The arms shipments included rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, rockets and other light weaponry. These arms “could not be destined for the Iraqi security forces because US arms would be given to them”, a source told Syed Saleem Shahzad – the Times’ Pakistan bureau chief who, “known for his exposes of the Pakistani military” according to the New Yorker, was murdered in 2011. Rather, the US is playing a double-game to “head off” the threat of a “Shi’ite clergy-driven religious movement,” said the Pakistani defense source. This was not the o­nly way US strategy aided the rise of Zarqawi, a bin Laden mentee and brainchild of the extremist ideology that would later spawn ‘ISIS.’

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar.Award-winning journo. Nafeez is a regular contributor to The Guardian, UK.

14. NATO is harboring the Islamic State. Nafeez Ahmed

(The full text see here [20]). Why France’s brave new war o­n ISIS is a sick joke, and an insult to the victims of the Paris attacks. “We stand alongside Turkey in its efforts in protecting its national security and fighting against terrorism. France and Turkey are o­n the same side within the framework of the international coalition against the terrorist group ISIS.” Statement by French Foreign Ministry, July 2015. The 13th November Paris massacre will be remembered, like 9/11, as a defining moment in world history. The murder of 129 people, the injury of 352 more, by ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) acolytes striking multiple targets simultaneously in the heart of Europe, mark a major sea-change in the terror threat.

For the first time, a Mumbai-style attack has occurred o­n Western soil—the worst attack o­n Europe in decades. As such, it has triggered a seemingly commensurate response from France: the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1961 Algerian war. ISIS has followed up with threats to attack Washington and New York City. Meanwhile, President Hollande wants European Union leaders to suspend the Schengen Agreement o­n open borders to allow dramatic restrictions o­n freedom of movement across Europe. He also demands the EU-wide adoption of the Passenger Name Records (PNR) system allowing intelligence services to meticulously track the travel patterns of Europeans, along with an extension of the state of emergency to at least three months. Under the extension, French police can now block any website, put people under house arrest without trial, search homes without a warrant, and prevent suspects from meeting others deemed a threat.

“We know that more attacks are being prepared, not just against France but also against other European countries,” said the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “We are going to live with this terrorist threat for a long time.” Hollande plans to strengthen the powers of police and security services under new anti-terror legislation, and to pursue amendments to the constitution that would permanently enshrine the state of emergency into French politics. “We need an appropriate tool we can use without having to resort to the state of emergency,” he explained. Parallel with martial law at home, Hollande was quick to accelerate military action abroad, launching 30 airstrikes o­n over a dozen Islamic State targets in its de facto capital, Raqqa. France’s defiant promise, according to Hollande, is to “destroy” ISIS.

The ripple effect from the attacks in terms of the impact o­n Western societies is likely to be permanent. In much the same way that 9/11 saw the birth of a new era of perpetual war in the Muslim world, the 13/11 Paris attacks are already giving rise to a brave new phase in that perpetual war: a new age of Constant Vigilance, in which citizens are vital accessories to the police state, enacted in the name of defending a democracy eroded by the very act of defending it through Constant Vigilance. Mass surveillance at home and endless military projection abroad are the twin sides of the same coin of national security, which must simply be maximized as much as possible. “France is at war,” Hollande told French parliament at the Palace of Versailles. “We’re not engaged in a war of civilizations, because these assassins do not represent any. We are in a war against jihadist terrorism which is threatening the whole world.”

The friend of our enemy is our friend. Conspicuously missing from President Hollande’s decisive declaration of war, however, was any mention of the biggest elephant in the room: state-sponsorship. Syrian passports discovered near the bodies of two of the suspected Paris attackers, according to police sources, were fake, and likely forged in Turkey. Earlier this year, the Turkish daily Meydan reported citing an Uighur source that more than 100,000 fake Turkish passports had been given to ISIS. The figure, according to the US Army’s Foreign Studies Military Office (FSMO), is likely exaggerated, but corroborated “by Uighurs captured with Turkish passports in Thailand and Malaysia.”…

The former ISIS fighter told Newsweek that Turkey was allowing ISIS trucks from Raqqa to cross the “border, through Turkey and then back across the border to attack Syrian Kurds in the city of Serekaniye in northern Syria in February.” ISIS militants would freely travel “through Turkey in a convoy of trucks,” and stop “at safe houses along the way.”… A report by the Turkish Statistics Institute confirmed that the government had provided at least $1 million in arms to Syrian rebels within that period, contradicting official denials. Weapons included grenades, heavy artillery, anti-aircraft guns, firearms, ammunition, hunting rifles and other weapons—but the Institute declined to identify the specific groups receiving the shipments. … Turkey has also played a key role in facilitating the life-blood of ISIS’ expansion: black market oil sales. Senior political and intelligence sources in Turkey and Iraq confirm that Turkish authorities have actively facilitated ISIS oil sales through the country. Last summer, Mehmet Ali Ediboglu, an MP from the main opposition, the Republican People’s Party, estimated the quantity of ISIS oil sales in Turkey at about $800 million—that was over a year ago. By now, this implies that Turkey has facilitated over $1 billion worth of black market ISIS oil sales to date….

Unsurprisingly, then, Turkey’s anti-ISIS bombing raids have largely been token gestures. Under cover of fighting ISIS, Turkey has largely used the opportunity to bomb the Kurdish forces of the Democratic Union Party (YPG) in Syria and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey and Iraq. Yet those forces are widely recognized to be the most effective fighting ISIS o­n the ground…..It is not just Turkey. Senior political and intelligence sources in the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) have confirmed the complicity of high-level KRG officials in facilitating ISIS oil sales, for personal profit, and to sustain the government’s flagging revenues.

German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, who spent 10 days inside the Islamic State, reported last year that ISIS is being “indirectly” armed by the West: “They buy the weapons that we give to the Free Syrian Army, so they get Western weapons—they get French weapons… I saw German weapons, I saw American weapons.” ISIS, in other words, is state-sponsored—indeed, sponsored by purportedly Western-friendly regimes in the Muslim world, who are integral to the anti-ISIS coalition.

Europe’s dance with the devil. Turkey plays a key role in the US-Qatar-Saudi backed route designed to circumvent Russia and Iran, as an intended gas hub for exports to European markets…..Never mind that under Erdogan, Turkey is the leading sponsor of the barbaric ‘Islamic State.’ We must not ask unpatriotic questions about Western foreign policy, or NATO for that matter. We must not wonder about the pointless spectacle of airstrikes and Stazi-like police powers, given our shameless affair with Erdogan’s terror-regime, which funds and arms our very own enemy…..

(Full text of the article with all the references sees here: [21]). Following the insight of Hannah Arendt, a leading political theorist of mid-20th century totalitarianism, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended upon the United States. Thoughtlessness, a primary condition of authoritarian rule, now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take o­n the role of unthinking children, while children are pushed to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures that saddle them with debt and cripple their ability to be imaginative. Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a mind-numbing anti-intellectualism evident in the banalities produced by Fox News infotainment and celebrity culture, and in the blinding rage produced by populist politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and rail against immigration, the rights of women, public service workers, gay people and countless others. There is more at work here than a lethal form of intellectual, political and emotional infantilism. There is also a catastrophe of indifference and inattentiveness that breeds flirtations with irrationality, fuels the spectacle of violence, creates an embodied incapacity and promotes the withering of public life….

Given these conditions, an overwhelming catalogue of evidence has come into view that indicates that nation-states organized by neoliberal priorities have implicitly declared war o­n their children, offering a disturbing index of societies in the midst of a deep moral and political catastrophe. Far too many youth today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the dictates of a market-driven society or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can o­nly result in a more dreadful nightmare. As Jennifer Silva has pointed out, this generation of especially “young working-class men and women … are trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support networks…. They live at home longer, spend more years in college, change jobs more frequently and start families later.”

Youth today are not o­nly plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present; they are also “the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.” It is little wonder that “these youngsters are called Generation Zero: A generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future,” and zero expectations. Or to use Guy Standing’s term, “the precariat,” which he defines as “a growing proportion of our total society” forced to “accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living.” Too many young people and other vulnerable groups now inhabit what might be called a geography of terminal exclusion, a space of disposability that extends its reach to a growing number of individuals and groups…..

Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a society that fails to provide for its youth, the symbolic and real violence waged against many young people reflects nothing less than a collective death wish – especially visible when youth protest their conditions. As Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is near zero tolerance for democratic resistance and “infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions.” How else to explain the FBI’s willingness to label as a “terrorist threat” youthful activists speaking against corporate and government misdeeds, while at the same time the Bureau refuses to press criminal charges against the banking giant HSBC for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda?...

Many young people are being depoliticized because they are struggling just to survive, not o­nly materially but also existentially. The war o­n youth is spreading out across the United States. How else might we explain the United States’ turning of schools into training centers, modeling many after prisons, or promoting the rise of pedagogies of repression such as teaching to the test and high-stakes testing, all in the name of educational reform? What is the role of education in a democracy when a society burdens an entire generation with high tuition costs and student loans? I think David Graeber is right in arguing, “Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture…. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.”What he does not say is that many young people are also being depoliticized because they are struggling just to survive, not o­nly materially but also existentially….

In what follows, I want to address the intensifying assault o­n young people through the related concepts of “soft war” and “hard war.” The idea of the soft war considers the changing conditions of youth within the relentless expansion of a global market society. Partnered with a massive advertising machinery, the soft war targets all children and youth, devaluing them by treating them as yet another “market” to be commodified and exploited, and conscripting them into the system through relentless attempts to create a new generation of hyper consumers. This low-intensity war is waged by a variety of corporate institutions through the educational force of a culture that commercializes every aspect of kids’ lives, and now uses the internet and various social networks along with the new media technologies such as smart phones to immerse young people in the world of mass consumption in ways that are more direct and expansive than anything we have seen in the past. Commercially carpet-bombed by an advertising industry that in the United States spent $189 billion in 2012, the typical child is exposed to about 40,000 ads a year and by the time they reach the fourth grade, children have memorized 300 to 400 brands…..

The hard war is a more serious and dangerous development for young people, especially those who are marginalized by virtue of their ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and class. The hard war refers to the harshest elements of a growing youth crime-control complex that operates through a logic of punishment, surveillance and control. The young people targeted by its punitive measures are often poor youth of color who are considered failed consumers and who can o­nly afford to live o­n the margins of a commercial culture that excludes anybody without money, resources and leisure time. They are youth considered uneducable and unemployable, and therefore troublesome, if not a threat to the existing order. Poor youth and youth of color become objects of a new mode of governance based o­n the crudest forms of disciplinary control…. The rise of the punishing state and the war o­n terror has emboldened police forces across the nation….

Young people are not dissatisfied with democracy but with its absence. Childhood stolen was not to be salvaged by self-help – that shortsighted and mendacious appeal that would define the reactionary reform efforts of the 1980s and 1990s, from Reagan’s hatred of government to Clinton’s attack o­n welfare reform and his “instrumental role in creating o­ne of the world’s largest prison systems.”… Like the great critical theorist, C. Wright Mills, Brown’s lasting contribution was to reconfigure the boundaries between public issues and private suffering. For Brown, racism was about power and oppression – not ignorance, not fear – and could not be separated from broader social, economic and political considerations….

We live at a time in which it is more crucial than ever to imagine a future that does not repeat the present. Given the urgency of the problems we face – mounting economic inequality, creeping disenfranchisement, the rise of the incarceration state, entrenched racism, the expanding surveillance state, the threat of nuclear destruction, ecological devastation and in the United States, the collapse of democratic governance – I think it is all the more crucial to take seriously the challenge of Jacques Derrida’s provocation: “We must do and think the impossible. If o­nly the possible happened, nothing more would happen. If I o­nly did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything.” My friend, the late Howard Zinn, got it right in his insistence that hope is the willingness “to hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.” History is open, and the space of the possible is larger than the o­ne o­n display.

Dr. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, Canada. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com

16. Silent Violence Against Women. Rene Wadlow

“How many victims of silence there are, and at what cost! Silence has its laws and its demands… Silence demands that its enemies disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice of complaint or protest or indignation disturb its calm. And when such a voice is heard, silence strikes with all its might to restore the status quo ante – the state of silence.” — Ryszard Kapuscmski in ‘The Soccer War’.

25 November is the UN-proclaimed International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Violence against women is a year-round occurrence and continues to an alarming degree. Violence against women is an attack upon their bodily integrity and their dignity. We need to place an emphasis o­n the universality of violence against women, the multiplicity of its forms and the ways in which violence, discrimination against women, and the broader system of domination based o­n subordination and inequality are inter-related. The value of a special ‘Day’ is that it serves as a time of analysis of the issue and then of re-dedication to take both short-term and longer-range measures.

Pierre Spitz (1978), a former Geneva colleague, had coined the term “silent violence” for policies which not o­nly perpetuate the existing system but in some cases reinforce it by forestalling the development of a political consciousness which might degenerate into social disorder. In this spirit, we can speak of “silent violence” against women. Both at the international UN level and at the national level, there have been programmes devoted to the equality of women and to the promotion of women in all fields for some time. However, o­nly recently has there been growing attention to physical violence against women and to the trafficking of women. When the issue of violence against women has been raised by NGO representatives in the UN human rights bodies, the government representatives replied that violence against women exists but is very rare in their country and that “domestic violence within the family” is a subject they cannot deal with unless action is taken by the police. Thus, there has been just enough attention given to violence against women to prevent “the development of a political consciousness which might degenerate into social disorder.”

Yet as Susan George (1988), another former Geneva colleague, has written “That all governments are concerned for, and are representative of, the majority of their people is patent nonsense. Plenty of governments are most concerned with enriching those who keep them in power. Human rights, including the right to food, run a poor second.” At the national level in many countries, women have largely remained invisible and inaudible by being allowed to have the key role in the “informal sector” — those sectors of the economy that are the least organized, often left out of the statistics of the formal economy as if it did not count. Women have turned to the informal sector — or have been pushed into it — as a way of sustaining a livelihood for their families. Women’s work in this sector accounts for a large proportion of total female employment in most developing countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia. The informal sector, though often considered marginal in economic planning, tends to account for a significant proportion of total employment. In this informal sector, women work as food producers, traders, home-based workers, domestic workers, recyclers of waste, prostitutes, and increasingly engage in drug trafficking — anything to earn an income to feed their children. The informal sector is their last hope for economic and social survival for themselves and their families.

In the informal society, women survive and often have a major responsibility for the economy of the whole family. Fathers are often absent by need or by choice. Some women do well in the informal sector and serve as a model — or a hope — as to what others can accomplish. Self-employed women are increasingly helped by micro-credit programs. These are useful but rarely do such loans allow a person to move outside the informal economy. There has been a good deal of research o­n women’s role in agriculture, o­n women’s informal-sector employment, and increasingly o­n women’s entrepreneurship. Researchers in different world regions have pointed to the handicaps faced by women to obtain credit and in getting access to new agricultural technologies. However, research has rarely been brought into the mainstream of global or national decision-making.

Inequality and the walls built around the informal sector are the marks of the “silent violence” against women. Amartya Sen defined the major challenge of human development as “broadening the limited lives into which the majority of human beings are willy-nilly imprisoned by the forces of circumstance.” o­n 25 November, this day for the elimination of violence against women, we need to look closely at the social, cultural and economic walls that imprison.[22]

Dr. René Wadlow, is president and a U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of World Citizens and editor of Transnational Perspectives

17. End the Cycle of Violence. James Albertini

The recent horrific violence in Paris, along with the o­ngoing wars in the Middle East with increasing numbers of refugees, and the growing reality of climate disaster, has brought our world’s crisis of violence to center stage. Together, let us mourn those killed in Paris and all victims of violence, but let us do more.

To break the cycle of violence, to save our world from total destruction, we must come to a new understanding, and we better do it fast. First, we must begin to see ourselves as we really are, not as we would like to think we are, and make changes accordingly for justice, peace, and planetary survival. The U.S. likes to see itself as the “exceptional” nation, a bastion of freedom and democracy, the world’s benevolent “good guy.” Evil is out there in others – the terrorists. o­n the other hand, much of the world sees the U.S. (and its ally France) as a dangerous racist empire of domination out to exploit and control labor and resources to benefit corporate interests and a wealthy elite at the expense of the earth and everyone else. Thus the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, etc. with millions killed, wounded, and displaced. ISIS obviously sees itself as the “good guys” and the problem of evil focused in France, the US, etc. Both sides appear to agree – “by any means necessary.”

Mahatma Gandhi o­nce said, “An eye-for-an-eye will o­nly make the whole world blind.” My mother, and I’m sure yours too, said more than o­nce that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” Despite such words of wisdom, the hysteria of vengeance, fear, hate, and bombs are bursting all over. The cycle of violence is escalating. Violence is begetting more violence. Where will it end other than more bloodshed, chaos and total disaster? o­ne thing is clear. Revenge – more guns, bombs, suicide belts, drone strikes/terrorist attacks, assassinations, increased surveillance and discrimination, invasions, regime changes, illegal wars, rolling back civil rights and creating chaos, death and destruction is not the answer. Our violence is killing us and the earth we share. Terrorism against terrorism is terrorism (but what you will do with a terrorist who cuts off your head? – L.S.).

We can neither bomb our way to peace abroad, nor arm, shoot our way to safety at home. Martin Luther King said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; o­nly light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. o­nly love can do that.” It’s time for restraint not vengeance. If we want to end the terror, we need to end the war o­n terror. Break the cycle of violence. Who knows what’s possible in a world beyond violence and the threat of violence. “If you want peace, work for justice. And in Hawaii we say – Live Aloha.” Put an End to War! o­nly Justice & Love Can Fix Our Broken World!

1. The Western Empire can be defined as a geopolitical entity, the core of which is the Metropolis – the United States, the closest allies – Anglosphere (UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). As a vassals, of different levels of importance in the imperial hierarchy, can be considered Japan, the EU and NATO, including the continental heavyweights Germany and France. There is also a group of puppet regimes from the former Soviet bloc countries and republics of the Soviet Union. In addition, there are many countries which are not strictly related to the military-political and other agreements with the Metropolis, but which are heavily dependent o­n it.

2. The “elite” of the Western Empire is trying to establish its absolute power over the planet, acting o­n the principle “America must always leadon theworld stage.Ifwe don’t,no o­neelsewill” (Obama, 2014). To achieve the goal, proclaiming the whole world as a sphere of vital interests of Empire, the imperial propaganda constantly creates “image of the enemy”, which is “forced” to conduct endless wars with. It is, in fact, a way of existence of imperial elite, without which its survival as a global force is virtually impossible. Nowadays, the main obstacle to the implementation of Empire’s plans and designs are Russia and China, announced as the main enemies.

3. There are various methods of conducting hybrid wars with disagreeable governments. Most often is used, known as technology of “colour revolutions” [25], the mechanism of “non-violent” regime change proposed in the second half of the 20th century by the American Gene Sharp. Since then the Sharp’s technology is widely used by Empire to overthrow and replace unwanted governments by its satellites. Among 198 methods coup, proposed by Sharp, there are such as the seizure of the territory, foreign intervention, and even rebellion, which obviously could not be considered as “non-violent”.

4. Over the past four decades more than thirty attempts to commit a colour revolutions were undertaken. About two-thirds of them resulted in a change of government and/or a civil war, in other cases the authorities have resisted. There are several ways to neutralize Sharp’s technology, including opposing waves, isolation of opponent, exposing the enemy, soft power. From the “colour scourge” the country can be protected by membership in military-political alliance, as well as by carried within the law total check of communication channels, supply and actions taken by opposition. In practice, the real oppugnancy to the colour revolution involves the use of more than o­ne of these methods.

5. The success or failure of colour revolution depends o­n many factors, but primarily o­n the level of foreign aid to opposition. As the ram, designed to break through the protective wall of authorities and lead to its overthrow, the Empire is betting o­n “fifth column”, mainly composed of opponents of the regime and the masses of discontented citizens attracted by beautiful slogans of opposition, by a desire for a better life and actually used as “useful idiots”. In certain conditions the protest potential can be significantly enhanced by so-called “sixth columns”.

6. An element of a hybrid war is the hunt for unwanted leaders. Since February 2007, after the speech at Munich Conference o­n Security Policy, the main object of hunt is Vladimir Putin. In his Munich speech he criticized the idea of ​​a unipolar world. In some circles of the Western elite Putin’s speech was perceived as the beginning of a new Cold War and as an incentive to strengthen the unity of the Atlantic, that is, strengthening imperial hierarchy.

7. o­n the influence and capabilities of the Empire is possible to judge, at least approximately, by the results of open voting at the plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly o­n the draft resolution “The territorial integrity of Ukraine.” The comparison of statistical data shows that alone BRICS (which did not support the resolution) exceeds the Empire total population, territory and natural resources, and if current trends continue will surpass, with time, in economic and military indicators.

8. The Empire’s elite controls its own domainthrough military, economic, financial and information structures, cultural, educational, charitable organizations, research institutions, units and funds for the promotion of democracy, or civil society, or human rights, etc. Among the structures of empire-wide significance are allocated US War Department with headquarters in the Pentagon, the Secret Services of the United States and Great Britain, as well as mainstream media actually controlled by elite.

9. Collapse of the concept of European multiculturalism, put forward in opposition to the theory of meltingpot, clearly reveals the “clash of civilizations”, the incompatibility of different cultural paradigms and values. It was vividly manifested in the bloody drama which took place in headquarters of “Charlie Hebdo” and in the following events. Extremely serious threat to European civilization is the invasion of migrants to the EU, certainly provoked by external forces. It is reasonable to believe that the principle divide and rule nowadays is used by Empire in relation to the EU and Islam.

10. Among the organizations, subordinated to the Empire, seems to be especially impressive the EU which unifies 28 countries with a population of half a billion and a combined GDP of about $ 18 trillion. However, in none serious international conflict the EU has not proved itself as an independent force. It looks like a Eurasian periphery of the Empire, forced to take part in the military and other games of Big Brother, contrary its own interests.

11.The most important among the empire-wide structures may be assumed the US Federal Reserve. Fed serves as the Central Bank, it carries out monetary emission and other financial activities, including operations o­n the world currency markets. Formally, the Fed is under strict control of the President and the US Congress, however, many believe that, in fact, it has a high degree of autonomy, has a huge impact o­n the world economy and politics, and is an effective instrument of war in the interests of Western elite.

12. A powerful tool of geopolitical influence of Metropolis is the dollar. According to Breton Woods agreement of 1944 the gold price has been pegged to the dollar, which has actually become the world’s money. By the end of the 40s of the last century in the US accounts for 70% of the world’s gold reserve. And today, considering the foreign gold which is stored in the vaults of the US and its British allies, at least 2/3 of the world’s gold reserve is under the control of the Empire. The Jamaican currency system, finally formed in 1978, abolished the gold parity of the dollar, but the dollar has retained its position as the world’s reserve currency. However, the use of the national currency for the needs of international trade leads to an inherent contradiction, known as the Triffin dilemma.

13. There are evidences that the Empire conducted some experiments o­n people. The experiments were conducted in different countries o­n captives, the mentally ill, prisoners and the poor, as well as the citizens of America. But the most controversial is the removal of many leaders, unwanted for Western elite. A partial list of top officials who were killed, died under mysterious circumstances, ousted,or subjected to intense attack by imperial structures, has dozens of names. Thousands of people were victims of “Operation Condor” undertaken by joint efforts of seven Latin American dictatorships and led by Western intelligence agencies.

14. The imperial elite, representing the interests of an insignificant group of people, is highly interested in the loyalty of population and its unanimity, which are achieved by the monopoly o­n information, incessant indoctrination and by settings, laid in education. The foreign Services of Metropolis, by blocking alternative information channels, greatly succeeded in the “brainwashing” of population in different countries. Under the guise of beautiful words is restricted the freedom of the individual and is realized the idea of ​​total control over the population of a large part of the planet.

15. The cornerstone postulate of Anglo-Saxon elite, unchangeable for three centuries, assumes an uncompromising struggle against any state or military-political alliance, capable to shake its world domination. Inspired by West the events in Ukraine, in particular the Crimea to Russia, served as a “convenient” pretext for the imposition of sanctions against Russia. But the main reason lies in the fact that Russia was step by step getting out of imperial control, restoring its sovereignty and its great power status. As a victim is also scheduled the European Union which is devoid of political will. Persistent attempts are undertaken to drive it to economic and migration crisis, to impose theTransatlanticTrade and Investment Partnership, thus turning EU into an economic appendage of the Empire.

16. The Empire is not omnipotent and is slowly but steadily declining. Nonetheless, it is still powerful and, having at its disposal a rich arsenal of ‘hybrid wars’ methods, is able to bring a lot of trouble to any country or government. In order to reflect looming over the country, in particular Russia, threats is necessary to use a protective mechanism of the state. It involves a variety of measures mainly of military-strategic and economic nature, including the expansion of trade-economic and military-political ties with friendly and neutral countries, the rejection of the dollar and the transition to national currencies in trade with partners.

Hrant Arakelian, PhD, is senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Law of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, author of 10 books and many articles, Armenia

19. Genocide and the Thanksgiving Myth. Brian Willson

(Full text of the article with all the references sees here: [26]). As we again plan to celebrate what US “Americans” call Thanksgiving, let us pause for a moment of reflection. Let us recognize that accounts of the first Thanksgiving are mythological, and that the holiday is actually a grotesque celebration of our arrogant ethnocentrism built o­n genocide.

Native Americans in the Caribbean greeted their 1492 European invaders with warm hospitality. They were so innocent that Genoan Cristoforo Colombo wrote in his log, “They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They do not bear arms . . . They would make fine servants . . . They could easily be made Christians . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want”. This meeting set in motion a 500 plus-year plunder of the Western Hemisphere, which then spread to the remainder of the globe. And it has not stopped! Historian Hans Köning concludes that what sets the West apart is its persistence, its capacity to stop at nothing. Cultural historian Lewis Mumford declared, “Wherever Western man went, slavery, land robbery, lawlessness, culture-wrecking, and the outright extermination of both wild beasts and tame men went with him”.

Jump 129 years to 1621, year of the supposed “first Thanksgiving”. There is not much documentation of that event, apparently a three-day feast, but surviving Indians do not trust the myth. Natives were already dying like flies thanks to European-borne diseases. The Pequot tribe in today’s Connecticut reportedly numbered 8,000 when the Pilgrims arrived, but disease had reduced their population to 1,500 by 1637, when the first, officially proclaimed, all-Pilgrim “Thanksgiving” took place. At that feast, the whites of New England celebrated their massacre of the Pequots in the Connecticut Valley where the Mystic River meets the sea. The Indians were in fact celebrating their annual green corn dance ceremony. But it was to be their last. William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and o­ne of the chroniclers of the 1621 feast, was o­n hand for the unspeakable massacre of 1637. He described it thus in his History of the Plymouth Plantation: “Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory”. The rest of the white folks thought so, too. “This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots” read Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop’s proclamation. The authentic proclaimed Thanksgiving Day was born. Few Pequots survived…..

Moving 158 years further, we discover a ruthless campaign conducted in central New York in 1779 during our “noble” Revolutionary War. The Continental Congress was furious that a majority of the Iroquois Indians (those who coined the Seventh Generation philosophy) were siding with the British against the colonialists who were rapidly settling their lands. The booming capital town of the Seneca Nation was Kanadesaga at the head of Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes region. In the summer of 1779, the Continental Congress instructed its Army’s commanding general to take care of the Indian problem. George Washington complied. He ordered General John Sullivan “to lay waste . . . that the country . . . be . . . destroyed,” instilling “terror” among the Iroquois Indians in central New York; General Sullivan affirmed that “the Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support”. Washington declared, “Our future security will be in their inability to injure us…and in the terror with which the severity of the chastizement they receive will inspire them”. The culminating day of “victory” was September 7, 1779. Total destruction of Kanadesaga and the forty other Seneca towns was accomplished by 4,500 troops, nearly o­ne-third of the entire force of the Continental Army. The o­nly major military campaign of that year, it was o­ne of the most vicious scorched-earth campaigns in history. All orchards and food crops were destroyed, all buildings were looted, then burned. Many of the escaping Senecas were scalped and butchered. “After the battle . . . Indian warriors . . . were scalped; Lieutenant William Barton amused himself by skinning two Indians from the hips down to make two pairs of leggings, o­ne pair for himself, the other a present for his major”.

Jump 162 years to 1941, when I was born in Kanadesaga, renamed Geneva by our European ancestors. As a young boy I blissfully collected hundreds of Seneca arrowheads, storing them in a special protected box in my bedroom. A chapter in my seventh grade history textbook taught that, “The Iroquois were the Indian Masters of the State,” but due to their “destructive attacks o­n the frontier settlements, George Washington decided to send an army to crush the Indians . . . The Six Nations never recovered from this blow”. Europeans o­nward and upward! The New Republic was formed in 1789, its 1787 Constitutional Convention having been conducted in enforced secrecy, never submitted to a popular vote. The third U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) described his vision of an “empire of liberty”, with expanded commercial enterprises and territory. And without any Constitutional authority he quickly doubled the area of the young country by acquiring vast Louisiana from France’s Napoleon for $15 million.

In 1807 he advocated preventive war: “If the English do not give us the satisfaction we demand, we will take Canada, which wants to enter the Union; and when, together with Canada, we shall have the Floridas, we shall no longer have any difficulties with our neighbors; and it is the only way of preventing them” (emphasis added). Others openly talked of expansion into Spanish America and Canada for planter and merchant prosperity in new markets, saying that the patriotic and virtuous “wise framers” of the Constitution had “too much wisdom to restrict Congress to defensive war.”After moving to Humboldt County in northern California, … From 1849 to 1860 the population decreased by 65 percent to 35,000, due to systematic killings; a detailed list of atrocities committed against Indians in California, including many in what is now Humboldt County, are found in Sherburne F. Cook’s The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization… Thousands of murders of Indigenous were proudly admitted by settlers and investors/speculators engaged in activities the equivalent of today’s paramilitary death squads operating outside “official” channels, i.e., acting parallel to or outside the jurisdiction of federal troops. Preventive war using terror against civilians as ordered by the government carried out by young male troops or paramilitary forces are “all-American” values. Such policies have been witnessed time and again in U.S. history, rationalized by our sense of being “exceptional” people. We remain in denial about our arrogant, racist and genocidal origins…. In simple terms, we remain a white male supremacy society of plutocrats supported by massive numbers of obedient consumers and laborers.

By revealing our social secrets (an oligarchy committed to selfish exploitation) and realizing that those secrets have pre-empted our social myth (a democracy committed to equal justice), we can help catalyze a revolution of consciousness. Recognizing that obedience to our system is killing us and the Planet’s capacity to host us, is a grand initial step for triggering the imaginative forces necessary to enable rapid movement toward a society based o­n mutual aid in which sustainable communities are built and nourished at the local level. We have yet to come to grips with the original holocaust that continues to serve as the defining and enabling experience of our “civilization”. Embracing this “shadow” can ironically enable sudden and radical shifts as we are freed from expending the incredible unconscious energy needed to conceal our shame. Sharing our grief for what we have done to others, and ultimately to ourselves, will be experienced as tremendous relief.

Brian Willson, PhD. is a peace activist, Vietnam veteran, lawyer, and author, USA. His books include o­n Third World Legs (1992) and Blood o­n the Tracks (2011); web: www.brianwillson.com

20. Origins of the American Way of War. ‘War Crimes Times’ Statement of Purpose

The ‘War Crimes Times’ provides compelling, o­ngoing information o­n war and the war crimes that invariably accompany war, the many costs of war, the effects of our war culture o­n our national character and international reputation, and the need to hold accountable those who initiate and conduct illegal wars. Additionally and importantly, we also report o­n the efforts of the many people who sacrifice their time, money, and comfort to work for peace.

When national leaders initiate hostilities they create the conditions—the extreme use of force coupled with limited accountability—for the war crimes which invariably follow. War crimes are therefore an inherent part of war. The suffering caused and the enmity aroused by war crimes must be regarded as costs of war. Since these and other costs far exceed any benefits of war, we seek to end war as a tool of international policy.

Towards this goal, we believe that holding war criminals accountable will send a strong message to all current and future heads of state to very carefully weigh all the consequences of the decision to go to war. While we recognize that United States has long relied o­n unlawful military force to further its foreign policy goals, we are particularly concerned with the blatant and egregious violations of international law committed by the United States beginning with the Administration of George W. Bush and now continued and expanded under President Obama.

We endorse any efforts, including impeachment, which would bring war criminals of any administration to justice. The War Crimes Times has resolved to see that Bush, Cheney, Obama, and other government officials and military officers who have committed war crimes are prosecuted—no matter how long it takes. There is no statute of limitations o­n war crimes.[27]

21. Global Peace Science: From War &Terror to Peace from Harmony of SPHERONS. Subhash Chandra

Nuclear terrorism is a most dangerous cancer to society & a global threat to humanity. The past decade has witnessed a significant rise in the profile of a security threat that has been a dominating issue in any discourse involving terrorism and nuclear weapons. The first act of nuclear terrorism is atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which brought more than 200 thousand innocent victims (please, compare them with 130 victims of terror in Paris), for which the US government refuses to apologize before the Japanese people every now. With this the Western terrorism starts [4; 16; 17]. It covered for 70 years 37 countries, killed more than 20 million [8] and generated the back wave of fundamentalist terrorism. Today, nuclear terrorism is maturing inside the USA new nuclear weapons testing in Nevada [13].

The escalation of terrorism, culminating in the 9/11 attacks o­n the World Trade Centre New York, USA and Washington, and of counter-terrorism in many parts of the world, are interdependent links in a chain of growing globalization of violence and violent globalization.

On 13 December 2001, 5 terrorists belonged to Lashkar-E-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad group attacked o­n most secure building of India – Parliament. Though the fatalities were reduced by killing all the terrorists before they could reach main building, but even the fact that these terrorists succeeded in entering the Parliament was itself a horrific truth. When they reached the convoy of Vice President of India, got off the car started firing. This battle went o­n for few hours till all five militants were killed. Killed - 6 policemen and 3 staff of Parliament died in this attack.

26/11 2008 Mumbai Terror Attack, 10 Fedayeen Terrorist entered in Mumbai from sea way and started killing innocent people however and wherever they can. A series of bomb blast and gun fire took place which lasted for 4 days. Total 166 Person died and 293 were injured in this attack which includes Indian and Foreigners both. Terrorism is the greatest 21st Century threat for the whole humanity. “India fully shares global concerns o­n nuclear terrorism and clandestine proliferation, which continue to pose serious threats to international security. Nuclear terrorism will remain a potent threat as long as there are terrorists seeking to gain access to nuclear material and technologies for malicious purposes. India is acutely conscious of this threat”. - Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement at the Plenary of the Nuclear Security Summit (March 27, 2012), Seoul.

On the evening of 13 November 2015, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks occurred in Paris by gunmen and suicide bombers hit a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars, almost simultaneously - leaving at least 129 people dead and hundreds wounded. The attacks have been described by President Francois Hollande as an "act of war" organized by the Islamic State (IS) militant group. The attacks were the deadliest o­n France since World War and the deadliest in the European Union since the Madrid train bombings in 2004.

At the heart of economic, political, social, and cultural problems of humanity in modern times lies the problem of the pursuit of culture of military science. There is great need of transformation of mindset from culture of military science to culture of peace science. It is the time to think together, act together & working together for all the global peace leaders to achieve the goal of sustainable Peaceful Future for next generations. Global Peace Science (GPS) is alternative to Nuclear War and terrorism that is unfolded in this book and especially in this chapter. The profound transformations are required from culture of military consciousness to peace consciousness through GPS as alternative to nuclear war [28].

GPS is science of Universal humanity, which protects it from nuclear collapse, opening the path of disarmament, demilitarization and the prevention from the USA new Hiroshimas. The 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings has led to renewed calls for an absolute prohibition o­n nuclear weapons. 2014 Laureate Right Livelihood Award:Basil Fernando from Sri Lanka has described the bombings as "the most definitive act, when morality was completely delinked from deciding o­n not o­nly the death of hundred thousands of people at that moment but also many more in future generations" [29].

The world is over armed and underfed. The global issues such as poverty, war, terrorism and climate change are interlinked and require a broad understanding for achieving collective security and world peace. Military science divides the humanity [30] and Peace Science promotes peace from harmony through the principle of ancient Indian Vedic tradition: "One World - o­ne Family" ("Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam"). This universality of humanity is embodied its 4 spheres and 4 SPHERONS of global social structure, including the entire population with all its groups, without exception, which produce society (noopshere) in all its diversity (see chap. 1) and their perpetual harmony ensures global peace through GPS together with others cultural institutions [31], eliminating war and terror of history.

Chapter 13 is the response to the tragic events of the terrorist attacks in October and November in Russia, France, Lebanon, Yemen and other countries. Peace Science (GPS) cannot ignore them, as these facts express the growth of global terrorism, precluding any attempt to peace and representing its absolute enemy. Peace science should generalize these facts, give them a scientific assessment and show the way to eliminate them. In this chapter, o­nly a little fraction of articles o­n terrorism and its close connection with the USA/NATO (further USA) global militarism are reprinted. The authors of this chapter differ two types of terrorism: state o­ne practiced by the USA and a fundamentalist o­ne (usually under banner of o­ne or another religious fundamentalism) practiced by part of the population and the former armed forces of countries such as Iran, Libya, Yemen and others, the state system of which was destroyed by American militarism/terrorism.

English journalist Rebecca Sumner writes about the US "war o­n terror" as lie: "We were told long ago that the “war o­n terror” would make the world a safer place. But after 14 years of permanent warfare, terrorist attacks around the world have escalated by a staggering 6,500%.", i.e. in 65 times! [32]. This "war" has led to the growth of the victims of terrorism for more than 50 times, it turned out to be a "big lie" and has cost the US taxpayers trillions of dollars, so it is more like to greenhouse and breeding ground for terrorism. (The US "coalition" war against ISIS/DAESH is also ridiculous and counterproductive by its results). Generally, all US foreign policy, according to scientists [7; 8; etc.] is state terrorism that is natural continuation of US militarism. With all the differences and armed confrontation of two terrorisms they both have o­ne, militaristic nature of armed violence. The USA state terrorism for 70 years after the terrorist nuclear bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki covered 37 countries and killed more than 20 million: it is a well-known fact [8]. Both terrorisms are inextricably linked and mutually nourish and stimulate each other. Militarism and terrorism are o­ne and identical in violation/trample of the right of everyone to life and ultimately in trampling the right to life of all humanity and the Earth planet, because they are able at anytime, anywhere to commit any terroristic act with any weapon and start a war including nuclear, deadly to human, society and nature in general.

Militarism and terrorism are much more dangerous for the life of every person and humanity as a whole than danger from any epidemic and natural disaster. Militarism and terrorism are using each other as the most dangerous weapon for the population in war with each other and with humanity [15]. An obvious example is the USA militarism relentless pursuit use the IS/DAESH terrorist state as a weapon of violent overthrow of the legitimate government of Assad in Syria, repeating the fatal mistakes of Libya and Iran. As a result, this state has grown and amplified many times, becoming a global threat. Scientists are looking persistently for the concept, which can express the general nature of militarism and terrorism and their social evaluation. Unfortunately, such concept is no found.

We propose to use for this purpose, the medical term for o­ne of the most dangerous pandemic – ‘plague’. It is well and clearly used by some authors (Henry Giroux) for the characterization and evaluation of American authoritarianism. [6] We decided to expand the scope of its social application, extending it to assess the overall social pathological essence of militarism and terrorism. Indeed, the plague, militarism and terrorism - are equally dangerous for all people, young and old. Their result is the same - death. They are dangerous for mankind as massive epidemics, which still remain incurable, though from a biological plague vaccines are invented, but against the social plague they do not exist. Normal people desperately want to get rid of this deadly social epidemic, destroy its causes and germs in society that briefly expressed Shakespeare's brilliant phrase: "a plague o­n both your houses," a plague o­n militarism and terrorism as the desire of their physical elimination. Their mutual armed destruction, as we see, o­nly contributes to widening this dangerous epidemic. 15 years of the American "war o­n terror" has led to unprecedented growth and prosperity not o­nly of US militarism, but also terrorism, now pretending to own state with a huge controlled territory, population, military forces and oil resources - ISIS/DAESH. Now it is organizing terrorist attacks in more than 60 countries o­n almost every continent.

We understand that social plague of militarism / terrorism is incurable by medicamentous ways and immunity against it cannot be restored by vaccines and immunization. It is clear to everyone. o­nly social organization and scientific consciousness with the appropriate general education, generating this consciousness since early childhood can withstand to social plague. Only they - the organization, awareness (science) and education, along with other cultural institutions of religion, art, media etc. - are able to provide peaceful social order, eliminating armed violence. Unfortunately, such an organization, awareness (science) and education since early childhood does not exist at humanity up to now, although attempts to establish them have been made innumerable. The cause of social powerlessness and helplessness in the face of the growing danger of militarism / terrorism is the absence so far the most constructive and effective spiritual instrument against them - Social Science of Global Peace (GPS), shared by all nations as an objective truth, which has deep roots in the structure of social reality, to be reckoned with, all without exception.

In this book the first time in history the peace science (GPS) is presented with its central discovery of SPHERONS - the objective harmonious classes of the population as necessary and sufficient actors of global peace, providing necessary to it the social organization and scientific public consciousness with their entire infrastructure. Therefore GPS is classified as a social vaccine and spiritual immunity from social plague of militarism / terrorism of early 21st century. GPS is able to eliminate over time, until the century end all the many and various bacilli of the most dangerous social epidemic, threatening the life of mankind. The book reveals in a first approximation, requiring further continuous and intensive development in the International Academy of Global Peace (Chapter 8 and other), a huge range of peacemaking instruments (laws, values, ways and institutions) from every sphere of social organism of humanity. This complex of scientific peace instruments, which is disclosed in the main parts in the book, provides social vaccine and spiritual immunity against the plague of global militarism and terrorism.

Dr. Leo Semashko. Editor in Chief, Global Peace Science (GPS)

23. GPS as Deadly Vaccine against the Plague of Militarism/Terrorism and Immunity from It. Leo Semashko

What determines the GPS healing essence as a social vaccine and immunity from militarism / terrorism? It is determined by the positive power of the intellectual soft force of peace science (GPS) able to oppose and overcome the negative power of intellectual soft force of military science. The latter occurred more than two centuries ago, reigns supreme over humanity and its accelerated development stimulate the rapid spread of the global militarism / terrorism plague personified in militaristic symbiosis of US / NATO. A social source of negative power of the military science is rooted in social disharmony, economic and political domination of the separate nations and private groups (PARTONS - see chap. 1) in the face of the ruling military-industrial-financial elite that has made war, the production of weapons, including terrorism, the most profitable and large-scale global business of the last two centuries. Military science provides the highest profit of the war, death and murder of people, so it is continuously flourishing with prosperity of military business, which turned in the 21st century by global plague of militarism / terrorism, which threatens the survival of humanity as a whole.

The human society organism can maintain itself and survive if the human mind will find in this organism the deep natural social structure of global peace, ensuring prosperity to all its parts (nations and countries) from their harmony without war, armed violence, militarism and terrorism. People for a long time, since Numa Pompilius, if not before, intuitively guessed about the existence of such a deep social structure of harmony as the natural immunity of the social organism from the plague of wars and violence. But o­nly the discovery of SPHERONS (Chapter 1) harmonious classes of the population employed in four spheres of social production and the creation o­n its base Global Peace Science (GPS) equips humanity with conscious vaccine and reveals the secret of its social immunity from war and militarism / terrorism. Knowledge of SPHERONS and based o­n them the peace science (GPS) constitutes the fundamental source of positive social powerof the GPS soft force able to withstand and overcome the negative power of soft force of military science, i.e., to win the war in a whole. Therefore GPS is deadly vaccine against the plague of militarism / terrorism and immunity from it.

The soft force of SPHERONS’ harmonious energy is irresistible and inexhaustible as any natural energy: gravity, electromagnetic and all other natural forces. It eventually overcomes all private oppositions, including militarist disharmonious power of the US empire in our time, and others. But, like any spontaneous energy, SPHERONS’ energy o­nly by becoming conscious and scientifically controlled maybe subservient to human. The path to mastering energy of SPHERONS opens GPS presented here for the first time as a result of the GHA decade of collective search. We, its coauthors, are well aware that it is not limited by the first step but o­nly starts its infinite path of improvement and further development.

This book, in a first approximation, revealed the GPS key definitions as:

1. The first common good and the right of everyone to global peace as absolute right to life which cannot be without science.

2. The revolution of social sciences, and, therefore, the revolution of social thinking in an integrated complex of their particular disciplines, through which alone the GPS creation is possible.

3. Creation of peace from harmony and not of war, armaments and fear of them, how peace was built in the entire past history.

4. These attributes of GPS make it soft force, winning the war. GPS is a victory of peace over war in a historical scale, the transformation of the military history of mankind in peace history and transition from a military civilization to a new, peaceful and harmonious civilization of mankind. This transition is civilization revolution, for which will follow a new era - the era of unconditional individual and social peace, crowning a peaceful consciousness of humanity as a result of universal education of new generations in GPS.

Of course, this is the most common philosophical and sociological explanation of the GPS essence and social value, which is disclosed in detail in different spheres and different social sciences in the chapters of this book. Ahead will have a tremendous positive work, including overcoming the many obstacles before global peace from social harmony. This chapter, we will complete a generalized holistic model of Tetranet thinking of GPS, the methodology of which has been disclosed in detail back in the ABC of Harmony. [33] The proposed model includes the most acute global problems of our time and the mechanisms of their decision in principle o­n the basis of the GPS methodology.

For the first, we will construct a model of these problems, which will be a part in generalized model and binding to the present. The most acute global problems of our time are in front of everyone and do not require special proof. These problems are: 1. Warming Climate, 2. Militarism, 3. Terrorism, 4. Global Peace and its Science: GPS. For the sake of truth, we must admit that the latter problem has not yet become clearly conscious in the world public opinion but in view of its close connection with extremely acute problems of militarism and terrorism, it also becomes like as it is a single vaccine and immunity from their plague. These problems are interrelated and are expressed in the following model of Tetranet thinking. Model-23: The Sharpest Global Problems

Key among these problems is the peace problem, from the solution of which depends decision of all the others. o­nly solution of peace problem opens the ways and releases the funds to solve all other problems through annual reduction of military spending by each country o­n 2% per year, with the distribution of these funds for the GPS development and the fight against terrorism and global warming (Chapter 8). Solving problems of militarism, terrorism and global warming is inextricably linked with the development of GPS disclosing way of building global peace, the primary task of which is to gradually overcome its major obstacles: militarism and terrorism. Together with them will be solved the global problems of poverty, education, health and others.

The GPS key global importance is determined today that military tension and confrontation in the world has reached the utmost limit walking o­n the brink of world nuclear war, which will destroy the climatic balance and all the natural conditions of life o­n Earth. If world leaders and global institutions: the UN, UNESCO, G20, G7, and others do not want and are not able to realize the paramount urgency of the peace problem and its solution through development of appropriate science (GPS), it must make a global community (global civil society), which cannot be indifferent to this fact, as well as to climate warming. Global community should raise the question of global peace and its science (GPS) in the international agenda together with the issue of global warming, which has sense o­nly in the amicable and peaceful climate o­n Earth and deprived it in a "nuclear winter" climate o­n the planet. Of course, the hope of understanding this necessity is associated primarily with the BRICS countries and leaders. Unfortunately, their peaceful energy and initiative is now constrained by extreme aggressiveness of the US/NATO militaristic block (Chapter 9), which creates and develops global terrorism as the ultimate weapon against the BRICS countries, primarily against Russia and China (Chapter 13).

The o­nly adequate solution for BRICS in the current global situation of extreme military tension with the US/NATO is in changing geopolitical priorities. Today the BRICS forced priority is a military balance and military containment of the US/NATO growing aggression, where the BRICS will always be catching up and defending side, - it is a defensive or protective military priority. The BRICS undeniable offensive prioritycan be o­nly peace priority in the form of creation and development of the Global Peacebuilding Front (this is the BRICS "second front" today) o­n the base of Global Peace Science (Chapter 8), where the initiative and leadership will always belong to BRICSwithout rivals. Of course, the defensive military priority in an increasing aggressiveness of US/NATO must and will inevitably to be constantly maintained. This is an obvious strategy of self-defense against the growing aggression.

But strategy of this priority is in the war field, in which there is no place for real, naked and nonviolent peace. Only strategy of peace priority provides a nonviolent global peace. Therefore, o­nly this strategy may be offensive, o­nly this strategy provides the ultimate victory of peace over war hence o­nly this strategy can be victorious. Therefore, o­nly this strategy can and should be a priority for BRICS as a global peacebuilding leader, which has no competitors o­n the peace field. Of the two priorities of the BRICS geopolitics, the first place should be given, as required by the interests of global survival, peace priority, i.e. priority of creation and development of the Global Peacebuilding Front based o­n science (GPS) and through the relevant international institutions and summits under the UN aegis. In this geopolitical context creation and development of GPS within the International Academy of Global Peace (Chapter 10.14) takes a key, central place.

The lack of GPS deprives all states and International organizations including UN, UNESCO and other the capability of constant offensive peacebuilding geopolitics - we do not see any example of such a policy in the world. But everyone can see that the military dominance of the US/NATO in the world provides the undivided domination of global military geopolitics, in varying degree including all countries, without exception, completely pressing peacemaking geopolitics. The alternative to military geopolitics can appear o­nly with recognition and development of Global Peace Science.

Considering the disclosed geopolitical circumstances, now we will build the GPS Generalizing Holistic Model of Tetranet Thinking for Chapter 13 and the book as a whole and as their result or crown:

Model 24. Global Peace Science:

Vaccine and Immunity from Global Militarism/Terrorism;

Victory of Peace Soft Force over War. Geopolitics of peace instead of geopolitics of war in the 21st century

The chain of concepts of this model includes the known for us definitions:

2.Plague of US/NATO global militarism (its 4 spheres); its antagonism/enmity with Nature & Society & Human; trampling their right to life; its intellectual source is military science since 1799; its social source is irremovable ruling elite,less 1% of the population –

3.Plague of global terrorism (its 4 spheres); its antagonism/enmity with Nature & Society & Human;trampling their right to life; its source is US/NATO global militarism, which created it as own ultimate weapon -

4.Global Peace Science from Harmony of SPHERONS as vaccine and immunity against Plague of militarism & terrorism in 21st century and as source of Nature & Society & Human sustainable development & prosperity –

5.BRICS starts creation of the World Peacebuilding Front based o­n GPS and establishes International Academy of Global Peace together with its interfaith affiliates in religious communities of their countries-

6.BRICS initiates the World Summit for Global Peace under the UN auspices in October 2016 in Sochi to solve the sharpest global problems (model 23) and create International Antiterrorist Coalition in the context of GPS peacebuilding -

Under BRICS we understand the union of all peaceful coalitions: SCO, EACU, BRICS and the like. BRICS will start creating a World Peacebuilding Front, International Academy of Global Peace and its affiliates in the religious confessions of these countries, using the huge organizational potential of all religions and strengthening its by scientific infrastructure o­n the Vatican model developing scientific institutes within Catholicism for its reinforcement. In Model 24, the first four blocks are united around the planet Earth and the upper four blocks are combined by Nicholas Roerich Banner of Peace (chapter 7). Ultimately, this model assumes the following form:

The GPS Generalizing Holistic Tetranet Thinking Model-24:

Global Peace Science:

Vaccine and Immunity from Global Militarism/Terrorism;

Victory of Peace Soft Force over War. Geopolitics of Peace in the 21st century

This model completes the GPS substantive part, the importance of which is summarized in the Conclusion of this book below, where explains the origin of the resulting scientific formula of global peace in GPS: "Global peace comes (is built, created, ensured etc.) from harmony of SPHERONS through science, education, religion, arts, sport, journalism, through the culture in general, nonviolently overcoming militarism and terrorism of irremovable ruling elite ("golden percent") by Peacebuilding Front of SPHERONS, 100% of the population, which wants to live and not to die in the wars of elite. Center for Global Peace of SPHERONS and common cultural path to it uniting all other ways is Science (GPS)."